Word: lemay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...polls are any indication, about one out of every five voters?something like 14 million Americans?will choose the moment's satisfaction and pick Wallace and General Curtis LeMay, his running mate, next month. Fervent Wallaceites may, of course, decide at the last minute that a vote for their man is a wasted ballot and switch to either Humphrey or Nixon, but there is no evidence that this will happen. Thousands echo the opinion of Charles Gutherie, a cement finisher from Los Angeles: "You take Nixon and Humphrey and shake 'em up in a bag and they come...
...have to go," John Kennedy once said, you want LeMay in the lead bomber. But you never want LeMay deciding whether or not you have to go." The reason for Kennedy's caveat was that, like many fighting men, Curtis Emerson LeMay, 61, tends to view the world in crisp, absolutist terms Life, in his professional view, is a perpetual state of war or potential war. When he decided to join George Wallace's campaign, LeMay entered a cloudier more complex political world in which he is less at home. Said Barry Goldwater a former Air Force Reserve...
...capability to "bomb the North Vietnamese back to the stone age" and to "destroy every work of man in North Viet Nam if that is what it takes." Such outbursts turned even formerly sympathetic military opinion against him, bidding, heavy-jowled, with a cigar customarily clenched between his teeth, LeMay unintentionally promoted his own image as a character from Dr. Strangelove...
That caricature has tended to obscure what should be remembered as a highly distinguished military career. Fro the time of his boyhood in Columbus, LeMay was fascinated with flight. At Ohio State, he busied himself with ROTC In 1928 he obtained a reserve commission and left for a National Guard summer camp. His classmates tore off to Los Angeles for weekends, but LeMay in his singleminded fashion often hung back to vivisect engines and study weather charts and navigation. With his accumulating skill as pilot, mechanic and navigator, he was summoned after seven years in fighters to fly the first...
...World War II, he became something of a legend-and today he is the last of that era's heroes still seeking to command. In England, LeMay concluded that too many of his B-17s were missing targets because they zigzagged away from antiaircraft fire. He led the next raid over Saint-Nazaire, directing his planes in a straight-line block formation through the flak. Next day he ordered his planes to take no more evasive actions on their final bombing runs. Losses went up, but so did the proficiency of his bombers. LeMay took similar risks...