17. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 440-480

Book VII: A Spy in Orbit and a Game of Chance, 73. Palm Tree Disguises; 74. Keeping the Military on the Leash; 75. "Use 'em or Lose 'em"; 76. LeMay and Tommy Power as the Wild Cards; 77. Avoiding Götterdämmerung; 78. Buying Time for the Empire to Implode. Epilogue: The Schriever Luck, 79. Johnny von Neumann Finds Faith but Not Peace; 80. "The Slowest Old Trev Has Ever Gone in a Cadillac"; 81. Losing It All and Forgiving a Brother; 82. "Only in America"; 83. A Reunion With Hap

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At the end of May 1962, a Soviet delegation had obtained Fidel Castro's permission to place its missiles in Cuba, and between July and October Soviet freighters and passenger ships began moving the missiles and the troops to the island. Forty-one thousand, nine hundred two Soviet officers and men and thirty-six missiles, with launchers and nuclear warheads, had arrived by the time the crisis broke. Khrushchev retained the power to command the launch of the ICBMs, but the military could use any tactical weapons it saw necessary in case of an American invasion. That the transport went undetected can be blamed on the CIA, which was in disarray after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as well as the grounding of the U-2 spy planes after one had been shot down in China in September. An earlier U-2 had photographed surface-to-air missiles in western Cuba in August. And finally, most people simply didn't believe that the Soviets would be insane enough to put long-range missiles in Cuba.

The Soviets got caught when U-2 flights over Cuba resumed in October. The Joint Chiefs recommended air strikes to take out the missile sights, but Kennedy was concerned about retaliation and ordered a naval blockade. The military still wanted to strike and to follow up with an invasion, and LeMay pulled out the old comparison to Neville Chamberlain. But Kennedy, who had been reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, and didn't want to blunder into World War III, stood firm. No one knew of the tactical nukes in Cuba or that the Soviets were prepared to use them to repel an invasion. This would almost certainly have provoked the United States to use its own tactical weapons, "incinerating much of Cuba and its inhabitants and would-be Russian defenders." It would also have empowered the ultrahawks like LeMay and Thomas Power. Kennedy "raised the alert to DEFCON 2, a single step short of all-out nuclear conflict, on Wednesday, October 24.... All of SAC went to the highest possible state of readiness." The potential was there for the destruction of "the entire Northern Hemisphere."

Khrushchev was, fortunately, not a lunatic, though he realized he had been a fool. He backed down and started negotiating, getting a promise from Kennedy not to invade Cuba and to remove the missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of the missiles and light bombers. The Americans lifted the naval embargo in November, and the Soviets removed all but a brigade of 3,000 soldiers from Cuba. The missiles in Turkey were slowly removed: The last one left in July 1963, three months after the ones in Italy were removed and only a month before the ones in England.

As it turned out, the most significant effect of the nuclear stalemate was "to help buy the time needed for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own internal contradictions." The Soviet Union, its agriculture crippled by the system of collective farms, was forced to import corn and wheat from the United States. The only exportable products it produced were petroleum and natural gas, most of which went to Eastern Europe to prop up the fractious states it supported there. Where Khrushchev at least attempted to make reforms, Brezhnev was corrupt and cynical; he once told his brother, "All that stuff about Communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all, we can't leave the people with no faith." He was also responsible for the disastrous campaign in Afghanistan in 1979. Gorbachev's civil liberties reforms in the 1980s brought about a significant change but he could make no headway in improving the standard of living because of the "sclerotic economic system." Trying to hold the Soviet Union together, he let the Eastern European satellites go their own way in 1989. Boris Yeltsin finally dissolved the Soviet Union.

The nuclear stalemate was dubbed "Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. There was nothing mad about the grim equation. It made perfect sense by enforcing a nuclear peace." The madness lay in allowing the arms race to escalate: "Technology was in the saddle of a horse named Fear in a race of human folly." On the other hand, the rocket technology made possible the peaceful exploration of space: John Glenn rode an Atlas into orbit in February 1962 and the Titan II made the moon landing possible. The development of communications satellites made a global economy possible and transformed everyday life: "most people who slide their credit cared into the electronic reader on a gas pump or an automated teller machine have no idea their card's validity is being checked via space."

The question became not the quantity and quality of American military power, but whether the leaders of the United States would wield it wisely or foolishly, as the war in Iraq would so aptly illustrate. 

John von Neumann was diagnosed with cancer in 1955, was hospitalized in April 1956 and died in February 1857, age 53. Trevor Gardner, frustrated by the economies of the Eisenhower administration, resigned from his position as assistant secretary of the Air Force for research and development in February 1956. He returned to private business and wrote magazine articles denouncing the government's ineptness; these became fuel for the "missile gap" myth. He was regarded as "too controversial" for a government position, and died of a heart attack in September 1963, age 48. John Bruce Medaris found his space program handed over to a civilian agency known as NASA in 1959; he left the Army and became an Episcopal priest. Ed Hall, who never forgave Schriever, did forgive his brother Ted when he learned Ted was a spy.

Schriever became a four-star general in July 1961, but didn't get along with Robert McNamara and decided to retire in August 1966, just before his fifty-sixth birthday. His marriage to Dora went on the rocks in 1968 when he had an affair with another woman. They separated amicably but didn't divorce because Dora was a devout Catholic. In 1986 he met the retired pop singer Joni James, but didn't marry her until 1997, after Dora granted him a divorce. He was 87 and she was 67. In 1998, Falcon Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, a command center for satellites, was renamed Schriever Air Force Base. He died on June 20, 2005, age 94, and was buried in Arlington near Hap Arnold. 

2. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 13-40

Book I, Becoming an American: 4. White Silk Scarves and Open Cockpits; 5. Entering the Brotherhood; 6. A Fiasco and Reform; 7. Staying the Course; 8. A Fork in the Road; 9. "Let's Dive-Bomb the Bastards"

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Having attended Texas A&M, which was a military school where ROTC was mandatory, Schriever not surprisingly entered the Army on graduation. And San Antonio was where the Air Corps did advanced pilot training at Kelly Field. As Sheehan notes, "This was the romantic era of flying, of white silk scarves, leather helmets and goggles, and open cockpits." Schriever entered flight school in July 1932, was selected for Advanced training eight months later, graduated in June 1933 and was sent to March Field near Riverside, Calif., for a year of active duty as a second lieutenant. His mother and brother went with him to Riverside because the Depression had forced her to close the sandwich shop and Gerry could no longer afford tuitition at A&M.

Hap Arnold, then a lieutenant colonel, was commanding officer at March Field. Arnold was a West Point graduate who had learned to fly in 1911 at the aircraft factory the Wright brothers had started in Dayton, Ohio. He didn't see combat in World War I, but worked instead in Washington on the efforts to start mass production of airplanes. He testified for the defense in the 1925 court-martial of Billy Mitchell, who was charged with insubordination for his efforts to get the brass to recognize the importance of air power. Arnold was punished for his support of Mitchell by being sent to the cavalry post at Fort Riley, Kansas, "to take charge of a small detachment of observation aircraft attached to the horse soldiers." By 1933, however, he had regained favor.

The Air Corps was still underfunded, however. "The B-3 and B-4 Keystone bombers that Bennie and his mates flew were big, ungainly biplanes with highly flammable cloth and wood-frame wings and fuselages." Flight instruments were primitive and fliers were limited to only four hours of flight a month when the weather was favorable. Schriever had plenty of time for golf, which allowed him to network, and his mother made friends with Arnold's wife, which "led to Bennie becoming well acquainted with his commanding officer."

In 1934, a scandal involving commercial contracts for flying the mail led President Roosevelt to temporarily turn over the job to the Air Corps, whose planes were, as noted above, poorly equipped especially for night flying. But given that it was an improvement over being able to fly only four hours a month, the pilots were eager to do it. "To keep from freezing in the open cockpits, the pilots wore leather face masks and flying suits, both lined with sheepskin." But the lack of instrumentation was disastrous: "Twelve pilots were killed in all and there were sixty-six crashes. Roosevelt turned the job over to commercial fliers again in June, but the deaths had made the government aware of the state of the Air Corps' equipment.

The threat of war in Europe that became apparent in the mid-1930s led to the development of better military aircraft, including the B-17 Flying Fortress that Boeing produced in 1935, a dozen of which were on their way to Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. "To Schriever, the sequence was clear. Had the alarm not been raised by the air mail disaster, that rudimentary air force would not have existed when the moment of peril came."

But Schriever had been forced by the lack of funding to return to civilian life in March 1935. He and his mother returned to San Antonio, where they were joined later by Gerry, who completed his college course work at the University of San Antonio and entered the same Flying School that Bennie had attended. Bennie took charge of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp on the Arizona-New Mexico border in June 1935 and developed skills at managing people.

In 1936 the Air Corps was building up again, and Schriever went to Albrook Field in Panama, where the commander for the Canal Zone, Brigadier General George H. Brett, heard of Schriever's golf prowess and asked him for some pointers on improving his game. Brett made him one of his aides and one day in 1937 sent him to pick up his daughter, Dora, who was arriving on a transport ship after a stay in Washington. After leaving the Air Corps again and taking a job as a co-pilot for Northwest Airlines in Seattle, he married Dora in January 1938 at the home of Hap Arnold, who was a good friend of the Bretts, in Washington. Arnold became head of the Air Corps in September of that year and urged Schriever to apply for a commission again. Schriever was sworn in on October 1, 1938. The Schrievers' first child, Brett Arnold, was born on March 23, 1939.

George Brett had been put in charge of the testing facilities and laboratories at Wright Field near Dayton, and requested that Schriever be assigned to him as a test pilot. Schriever entered the Air Corps Engineering School at Wright Field in July 1940, and impressed its commandant, George Kenney, so much that he was selected to go to Stanford in September 1941 to get a master's in advanced aeronautical engineering. The Schrievers' second child, a daughter they named Dodie Elizabeth, was born in June, and the family moved to Menlo Park, Calif. After Pearl Harbor, Schriever was assigned to the Southwest Pacific Area of the Army Air Services in Australia, but he was not to leave until he had completed his work at Stanford, which he did in June 1942.

Schriever reported for duty in Melbourne where his father-in-law was a lieutenant general in charge of the Allied Air Forces, Southwest Pacific Area, but was about to be relieved of that command by Douglas MacArthur. Brett's replacement was George Kenney, and Schriever was promoted to major and sent to the 19th Bombardment Group to be engineering officer in charge of maintenance. Kenney chose to focus on bombing raids against the Japanese in New Guinea, and Schriever and Major John Dougherty put together a strike crew. Schriever and Dougherty flew a B-17 that dropped flares to illuminate the targets for the other bombers that followed. 

One night a cloud bank intervened between them and the targets on which they were to drop flares, so Dougherty, "a wild streak of an Irishman," decided to dive-bomb the target. "Schriever glanced at the airspeed indicator and it was registering 260 miles per hour. In fact, no one was ever known to have attempted bombing with a B-17 in this harum-scarum manner." They came under heavy fire, but received only six hits from small-arms fire. Dougherty won a Silver Star and Schriever an Air Medal for the maneuver. They later received Purple Hearts -- though neither was wounded (the medal was designated only for wounds later) -- for another raid over Rabaul in October. Schriever was then transferred to the Fifth Air Force Service Command as chief of the Maintenance and Engineering Division.