PART THREE: The Founding of the National Security State

In the 1930s, the US was still "building out" to its continental dimensions. The Interior Department was on a dam construction spree that tamed wild rivers and brought electricity to the West. The Hoover Dam, built at the bottom of the Great Depression, was the capstone of these civilian projects. It enabled the prolific growth of Southern California, home to much military industry and to a rabidly rightwing electorate that would spawn Richard Nixon.

WW2 kept alive the spirit of gigantic national projects; it just shifted this build out to the military.

The Pentagon, the largest building of its time, was the prime example. The concept of bringing the Army and the Navy (the Air Force, soon to be dominant, did not exist yet) under one roof was controversial. The infamous Army-Navy rivalry, which visibly played out in the Pacific campaign of WW2, as MacArthur and Nimitz each executed his own strategy, was so intense that the Navy at first refused to move into a structure built by the Army. That rivalry, which soon extended to the newly created Air Force, was never brought under political control, because the office of Secretary of Defense was designed to be nothing more than a referee between the services.

The most important of the national projects was the Manhattan Project, that gave the world the A-bomb. This project set the tone for everything that would come after. It enforced massive secrecy. It was, correctly if incompetently, worried about Communist spies. It created the A-bomb and cemented the Industrial Age worship of technology as the giver of godlike powers.

The crucial events of the rise of the Pentagon and the national security state happened before I was born. [NOTE 2] Until I read James Carroll's excellent, and largely under-utilized, study: House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, the Pentagon story he documents had been overshadowed by the McCarthyite hysteria, the rise of Nixon, and the early CIA successes in overthrowing governments. The military was just a taken-for-granted background presence to the Cold War, which was started by Stalin's grabs for power in Eastern Europe. Mr. Carroll tells a different story.

General LeMay

At the center of Carroll's story is General Curtis LeMay, a dangerous man, a proud mass murderer, a champion of blowing the Soviet Union to kingdom come ASAP. (It is noteworthy that Wikipedia's extensive bibliography of LeMay does not list Carroll's book.) His attitude was always on open display, as in this quote about firebombing Japan:

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay

Or this unabashed quote on nuking Russia:

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 aquired (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.

Now that's a sociopath! In the end, he flamed out into a caricature, being the template for General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, and becoming George Wallace's running mate in 1968 ("Bombs Away with Curtis LeMay"). But for a full twenty years, 1945-1965, he dominated the Air Force and the Pentagon in the same way that J. Edgar Hoover dominated the FBI. To cross LeMay was to risk one's career.

Why was LeMay so powerful? Because he, not the President, really controlled the Atomic Bomb. He drew up the attack plan (SIOP), which he kept secret from the civilian government. He stood between the president and the nuclear arsenal. Secretaries of Defense came and went; Administrations came and went. LeMay remained. This part of Carroll's narrative was, for me, the Rosetta Stone for understanding how the Pentagon came to be so powerful, how it so easily escaped civilian control after WW2. That is not to say that SecDefs or Presidents did not have a voice in military policy. It is to say that the long-term continuity of LeMay, and his control of nuclear weapons, his Nazi-like refusal to consider the Soviets as anything except vermin to be exterminated, allowed the Pentagon to stonewall the civilian government and become a power unto itself.

The bomb

The threat of the Soviets getting the bomb was present from the minute America had the bomb. Just as WW2 was ending, the bomb raised the stakes of war preparedness into the stratosphere where the bombers flew. It is important to realize that, until the late 1950s, bomber aircraft were the only means of delivering nuclear weapons. Therefore, the Air Force instantly became the most important service; and General LeMay, "hero" of the firebombing of Japan, became the most important man in the Air Force. As the postwar demand for demobilization rapidly shrank the army and the navy, the air force's nuclear capability came to be perceived as essential by military planners trying to deter the still massive Soviet armies.

The Domino Theory of the Cold War -- Harry Truman was no FDR

Harry Truman was an accidental president. He had been left totally unprepared and in the dark by FDR. He was a man of very modest means, who did not travel in foreign policy circles. That this unsophisticated, parochial man was thrown immediately into the deep water of dealing with Stalin and the atomic bomb was a recipe for disaster, because his teachers and advisors were ideologues, not realists. In foreign policy, Truman was a lightweight, who appointed his old mentor, James Byrnes, a man almost as lacking in foreign policy experience as himself, as Secretary of State. Byrnes's parochial blundering set the course towards the Cold War.

(at) the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting (September 1945)...Molotov teased Byrnes by asking him if he had a bomb in his hip pocket. Byrnes replied "You don't know Southerners. We carry our artillery in our hip pocket. If you don't cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I am going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it."...

The Americans took their own sphere of influence for granted...but the Soviet claim to a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe was denounced as ideologically driven imperialism...In private, Byrnes equated Stalin with Hitler, an analogy that would soon define American conventional wisdom. "Byrnes didn't understand what the hell was going on", (OSS officer) Lindsay told me. "He was in over his head. The meeting broke up in complete disarray. It was a first steppingstone to the Cold War."

J. Carroll...

Byrnes in turn, advocated for James Forrestal, the original defense ideologue. Forrestal quickly shouldered aside Henry Stimson, the elderly Secretary of Defense under FDR, and his policy of restraint in using and threatening to use atomic weapons.

Forrestal was Secretary of the Navy, and would become the first Secretary of Defense. Hardly an example of a steady hand on the nuclear trigger, he descended into paranoia and committed suicide while in office. In keeping with the theme of foreign policy elitism, it is worth mentioning that Forrestal made his fortune as a bond salesman at the Wall St. firm of Dillon, Read & Company.

Forrestal recruited two men equally paranoid on the subject of the Soviet Union: George Kennan, an embittered and junior member of the State Department; and Paul Nitze, whom Forrestal had hired at Dillon Read, an elitist hardliner who would occupy positions of power for the next forty years. These two men wrote the defining doctrines of the Cold War. Kennan authored the famous "Long Telegram" and the "X" article warning of Soviet perfidy and proposing the policy of containment. Nitze authored the infamous National Security Council memo, NSC-68, which advocated massive nuclear response.

These two men soon went their separate ways. Following Forrestal's suicide, Kennan changed his mine.

(Kennan) later saw that such an obsession with security in an insecure world would lead to madness. Especially once nuclear weapons were introduced into it. Instead of going insane, Kennan changed his mind. He became..."a Cold War iconoclast", a lifelong dissenter from the Totalitarian-school consensus that he himself had founded. Perhaps seeing Forrestal's fate helped Kennan to do so.

James Carroll, House of War

The world was not so fortunate in the case of Paul Nitze.

The most important aspect to note about Paul Nitze's long career is the way in which it carried forward the spirit of James Forrestal...Nitze and Forrestal formed an alliance to raise concern in Washington about the Soviet threat...

NSC-68 saw the world as divided between two mutually hostile systems of belief and politics, with one having the unabashed ambition of replacing the other. The Manichaean theology of America's postwar political doctrine was here explicit and complete...Us against them. A fight to the death...The Soviet Union and world Communism were identical, and with such antagonistic forces there could be no compromise, no negotiating, nothing but resistance...Every threat to something called freedom, anywhere in the world was a mortal threat to the United States...The stark bipolarity of NSC-68 would be one stout pillar of America's Cold War perceptions.

A lifelong member of the realist school, (Nitze) would have acknowledged none of the (psychological) elements beneath the view he had articulated with such force. But the contrast with the other supreme realist of his time, George Kennan, is striking. At least since repudiating the martial impact of his "X" article, Kennan had, in one historian's summary, "called for selective, discriminatory resistance to Soviet expansion, relying minimally on military threats and hardly at all on explicit or implicit threats to use nuclear weapons." Nitze, in NSC-68 called for "resistance everywhere and anywhere, with military force and the nuclear threat in the forefront."

-James Carroll, House of War

Truman, Byrnes, Forrestal, and Nitze were a chain of falling dominos that pitched American military policy into a paranoid posture from which it has never emerged. The opponents of this uncompromising stance were sandbagged time and again by genuinely dangerous events, which occurred like clockwork, almost yearly at the start of the Cold War.

** The 1948 Berlin blockade made the Air Force and General LeMay appear in a humanitarian role, instead of their normal nuclear sabre-rattlling. It also made the Soviets look every bit as threatening as the ideologues claimed.

** The 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test provoked the US to develop the H-bomb, which was matched within a year by the Soviets.

** 1949 also saw the stunning fall of China to Mao Zedong's Communists - a massive win for Communism that terrifed the US.

** The Korean war (1950) brought the Army back from nuclear-induced irrelevance, as it became clear that massive retaliation with bombers could not deter local aggression. Again, it supported the narrative about Soviet behavior.

** The paranoid attitude of the US led to it completely ignoring the opportunity presented by the death of Stalin in 1953. All attempts by the new Soviet leadership to open a dialogue were rebuffed as nothing more than a perfidious plot. A totally different world was possible, but Nitze's crowd refused to countenance even talking about it.

** The 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary kept the pot boiling.

** Finally, the 1957 launch of Sputnik sent the West into a paroxysm of fear, which led to even more military spending, based on an erroneous "missile gap". Sputnik legitimized claims of US unnpreparedness by Paul Nitze at the Gaither Committee hearings. In the end, the missile gap proved to be as incorrect as the previous "bomber gap". Nevertheless it got JFK elected and a thousand Minuteman missiles built.

In the end, the policies of reasonable men were defeated by the policies of apocalyptic fanatics, which seemed justifiable due to the poisonous actions and legacy of the sociopathic Stalin. It should be noted that these fanatics had the support of the elites and their allies, such as Hoover and Dulles.

The end result of fifteen years of increasing paranoia was, by 1960, a permanent military state, with close to 10% of the budget being spent on defense and intelligence. That very high percentage could be supported in 1960 even as the domestic economy boomed, because America was unbelievably rich and productive. Sixty years later, the incessant demands of the MIC have eliminated most of the non-military programs of government in order to meet the military's massive budget requests.

Summary

The 7,500 words you just read are more than adequately summarized by David Talbot's precis on C. Wright Mills' ideas:

Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece, The Power Elite, America was ruled by those who control the "strategic command posts" of society - the big corporations, the machinery of state, and the military establishment. These dominant cliques were drawn together by their deep mutual stake in "the permanent war economy" that had emerged during the Cold War. Though political tensions could flare within the power elite, Mills wrote, there was a remarkable unity of purpose among these ruling groups. The top corporate executives, government leaders, and high-ranking military officers moved fluidly in and out of one another's worlds, exchanging official roes., socializing in the same clubs, and educating their children at the same exclusive schools. Mills called this professional and social synchronicity "the fraternity of the successful."

Within this system of American power, Mills saw corporate chiefs as the first among equals. Long interlocked with the federal government, corporate leaders came to dominate the "political directorate" during World War II. The United States had largely become a democracy in form only. More than half of a century before the John Roberts-era Supreme Court that legally sanctioned corporate control of the electoral process, Mills recognized that the shift toward oligarchy was already well underway.

POSTSCRIPT: A brief history of our Garrison State since 1960.

The permanent warfare state reach a peak of social acceptability in the early 1960s. The army joined in the mania for irregular warfare by creating the Green Berets. A confident military intelligence complex descended on SE Asia, with the CIA running the secret war in Laos and the Phoenix program in Vietnam, while the Green Berets tried to out-guerilla the Viet Cong. Despite dropping more bombs than in WW2, the MIC suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. (A Vietnam era digression worth reading is the discussion of Robert McNamara in House of War. See [NOTE 3])

But, even though many think of the 1970s as a moment when the MIC was on the defensive domestically, that was only tactical, not strategic. The feeble attempts to rein in the CIA by Carter and Congress were easily defeated. It's true that the elites took a hard punch internationally; but, domestically, the chaos induced by Watergate and the infighting in the Democratic party following the debacle of the McGovern campaign left the door wide open to whatever forces were left standing. And, those forces were the MIC. In short, the 60s and 70s cut a few heads off the elitist hydra, but those heads only belonged to the employees of the elites. By 1980, the elites were back in complete control, with the figurehead Reagan as president. The real power lay in George Bush and William Casey.

The loss in Vietnam was met by the furious "doubling down" by the MIC, a trademark that has persisted ever since that time. That is probably because the actors who came on the stage at that time remained on stage for thirty years, ending their ignominious careers by trumping up the Iraq War.

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Congress had cut funds for any resumption of US combat activity in Vietnam. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, (Richard) Armitage, (Colin) Powell, and (Condoleeza) Rice all took the American reneging quite personally. They came into real power, as it were, powerlessly.

Never again...To overcome it, the Vulcans aimed at achieving nothing less than a fulfillment of the post-World War II dream of unchallenged American supremacy. Forrestal triumphant after all. Rumsfeld led the charge. And like Forrestal, he not only saw enemies that did not exist, he took their invisibility as proof of their existence...Rumsfeld's circle of true believers emerged from the culture, ideology, and moralism of the Pentagon itself.

James Carroll, House of War

"Invisible enemies" are another self-serving trademark of the MIC which has endured since Forrestal. We are living through yet another replay of this hysteria in the current Russiagate nonsense. However, the crew just cited, whom we know today as the neocons, was worse than mere rabid militarists. They were Trotskyite militants with a strain of nihilism instilled by the philosophy of Leo Strauss. The neocons got into power as soon as Nixon got out. But they had been warmongering for decades before, supported by the Democratic uber-hawk Henry (Scoop) Jackson, who first infected Washington with the likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Jackson merely demonstrates the bipartisan nature of the warmongering.

Influential policy analyst Albert Wohlstetter sends two of his young proteges, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, to work on the staff of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), a conservative hawk committed to working on behalf of the US defense industry. That summer, Wohlstetter arranges for Wolfowitz and Perle to intern for the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a Cold War think tank co-founded by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and former Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze.

Richard Perle, a young neoconservative just hired for the staff of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, is given a classified CIA report on alleged past Soviet treaty violations by CIA analyst David Sullivan. Apparently Sullivan leaks the report to pressure the US government to take a harder stance on the Soviet Union. Sullivan quits before an incensed CIA Director Stansfield Turner can fire him. Turner urges Jackson to fire Perle, but Jackson not only refuses, he also hires Sullivan for his staff. Sullivan and Perle establish an informal right-wing network called “the Madison Group” after their usual meeting place, the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop...

(In October, 1970) An FBI wiretap at the Israeli Embassy in Washington picks up Richard Perle, an aide to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, discussing classified information with an Israeli official. This is the second time Perle has been involved in providing classified information to Israel. This data was given to Perle by National Security Council staff member Helmut “Hal” Sonnenfeldt, who has been under investigation since 1967 for providing classified documents to the Israelis.

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Jackson assembles a staff of bright, young, ideologically homogeneous staffers who will later become some of the most influential and powerful neoconservatives of their generation, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Abram Shulsky, and Paul Wolfowitz. Jackson’s office—“the bunker,” to staffers—becomes a home for disaffected, ambitious young conservative ideologues with a missionary zeal for change.

Most neoconservatives like Feith and Wolfowitz tend to look to military solutions as a first, not a last, resort. To them, compromise means appeasement, just as Britain’s Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler. Stefan Halper (now tangled up in Russiagate), a White House and State Department official in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, will say of the neoconservatives, “It is use force first and diplomacy down the line.”

Many neoconservatives like Stephen Schwartz, a writer for the Weekly Standard, still consider themselves to be loyal disciples of Trotsky. Richard Perle is a Trotskyite socialist when he joins Jackson’s staff, and will always practice what author Craig Unger calls “an insistent, uncompromising, hard-line Bolshevik style” of policy and politics. Like Trotsky, Unger writes, the neoconservatives pride themselves on being skilled bureaucratic infighters, and on trusting no one except a small cadre of like-minded believers. Disagreement is betrayal, and political struggles are always a matter of life and death.

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islam...

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Not only is Perle a Trotskyite, he is a disciple of Leo Strauss, an unreconstructed fascist who believes that the end justifies the means; and his end is a dictatorship.

Leo Struass (1899-1973) was a student of philosophy in Germany and watched the Weimar Republic dissolve into chaos and then into tyranny. As a Jew, he was forced to flee Germany and he eventually ended up at the University of Chicago, where he developed a cult following from some the brightest students. For Strauss, the demise of the Weimar Republic represented a repudiation of liberal democracy. Liberalism, to Strauss, equals relativism, which necessarily leads to nihilism. Strauss longed to return to a previous, pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, of pure fascism.

These views resonated with Straussian disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol and Harry Jaffa. They took these ideas out of the classroom and translated them into actual political doctrine: the manifesto of the Project for a New American Century. Straussian principles would be implemented on a global scale, and 9/11 provided the perfect pretext. Paul Wolfowitz, who attended Strauss's lectures on Plato, became the architect of the Iraq War, using hyped intelligence concerning WMD's as the "noble lie".

The disciples of Leo Strauss have risen to dominate White House foreign and domestic policy; the disciples call themselves neocons; they call their philosophy neo-conservatism. This new conservatism is intoxicated with Plato's philosophy of nature. The new conservatism is not slow or cautious, but active, aggressive, and reactionary in the literal sense of the term. Inspired by Strauss's hatred for liberal modernity, its goal is to turn back the clock on the liberal revolution and its achievements.

Straussism: The Philosophy Directing The Age Of Tyranny

And that, readers, is the final destination for elite dominance - hijacked into a Nietzschean cult of the ubermensch and run by reconstructed Trotskyites more loyal to Israel than America. The WASP (white anglo-saxon protestant) elites had become so inbred and inept that they barely recognized the hijacking. Two brave souls, Walt and Meerscheimer wrote The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy to explain it all. Of course, they were immediately and predictably crucified by the lobby; and to this day, Israeli dominance of US mideast policy has grown to the point of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

In case you don't get it:

The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

- Frank Zappa

Show's over, folks. Welcome to your shiny new, climate-destroying garrison state. Vote early and often, because it doesn't matter.

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NOTE 2:
My main source for this overview of the early Pentagon is James Carroll's book. Carroll brings a unique insider perspective to the rise of the Pentagon, having been the son of a 3-star general and the next door neighbor of Curtis LeMay as a child.

NOTE 3:
McNamara had designed the Japanese fire bombing campaign for LeMay. That is, he was LeMay's subordinate. But, when JFK appointed McNamara SecDef, McNamara tried to get his subordinate, LeMay, and the military in general to submit to civilian control. His attempts to move away from "massive retaliation" backfired, as the alternative "counterforce" first strike strategy seemed to make matters even more hair trigger and unstable. McNamara continued as SecDef under Johnson, and was deeply involved in the Viet Nam war. Carroll paints McNamara as having deep feelings, unlike LeMay, who was simply a charismatic murderer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers - John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War
Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government