PROFESSOR KAYSEN, YOU WERE AT THE WHITE HOUSE DURING THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION, THE EARLY YEARS, COULD YOU TELL ME WHAT POSITION YOU OCCUPIED AT THE WHITE HOUSE AT THE TIME?

When I was in the White House during the administration of President Kennedy, I first came in as a senior staff member in the National Security Council staff, and after a little while, I was promoted and I became McGeorge Bundy's deputy, which meant that my title was Deputy Special Assistant to the President on National Security Affairs.

CAN YOU RUN THAT AGAIN?

When I was at the White House during the administration of President Kennedy I came first as a senior staff member of the National Security Council staff. In a little while, I was promoted to Deputy Special Assistant to the President on National Security Affairs.

WERE THERE DIFFERENT CURRENTS OF OPINION ABOUT NUCLEAR STRATEGY AND NUCLEAR ISSUES WITHIN THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION, AND COULD YOU PLACE YOURSELF, WOULD IT BE FAIR TO ASK YOU TO PLACE YOURSELF WITHIN THOSE CURRENTS OF OPINION?

There probably were more, were views of more than ones stripe about nuclear strategy among us, but I think that in general, we weren't a group of doctrine makers. We didn't try to think about what is strategy. We tried to think about how do you deal with this, that, or the other specific issue. Issues about nuclear strategy would arise when we looked at the strategic war plans, the so called, SIOP: the Single Integrated Operating Plan. Or when we talked about what kind of weapons we should buy and how many. Or, when we talked with the Secretary of defense, what he intended to say in his budget message to the Congress which, in a sense, was the most important single text for presenting our views about strategy.

YOU, TALKING ABOUT THE BUDGET, YOU SAID THAT WAS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS THAT WOULD COME OUT OF THE ADMINISTRATION. YOU PERSONALLY, I REMEMBER DID A STUDY ON THE NUMBER OF WEAPONS, THE NUMBER OF MISSILES WHICH YOU THOUGHT OUGHT TO BE PROCURED, AND OUGHT TO BE INCLUDED IN THAT BUDGET. COULD YOU TALK ABOUT THAT STUDY AND WHAT YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS WERE FOR WHAT REASON...WHAT STRATEGY WERE THESE TO SERVE, ETC...

Certainly the most important strategic decision that the Kennedy administration made was the decision about the what kind and how many weapons, new strategic weapons to procure. I remind you that one of the big items in the President's platform when he was a candidate before he was president was the missile gap, the allegation that the Soviets were ahead of us and that this was a situation that was threatening or potentially threatening. To be a little more careful I'd say that the Soviets were assumed to be ahead of us, not necessarily that they were ahead of us. And that, these campaign assertions, played some role in the frame of mind which these decisions were approached. It wasn't my business to act as if it were up to me to make a recommendation. I and my colleagues, particularly the President's science adviser, Jerry Wiesner, and one of his senior staff people... worked together on a comment, an analysis of the budget recommendations that the Secretary of Defense made. There was no great issue of strategy between us, or among us, I should say. The aim that this procurement served was to have a survivable second strike. Which was of such expected strength that it would deter any rational decision maker from making a first strike. Perhaps it's worth explaining a little bit, what all those words mean. When asked the question how much damage had to be threatened to the Soviet economy, to Soviet society so that no Soviet decision maker would think of using nuclear weapons. What was the deterrent level. And secondly, one had to say could you achieve this level of damage after the Soviets attacked the American striking forces? So the issue is what would survive after an attack, and how much did you need in order to inflict unacceptable damage. The notion of unacceptable damage is a bit arbitrary and fortunately we have no experience of it. Is the prospect of having fifteen percent of the population killed or seriously injured enough? Does it have to be twenty percent? Does it have to be twenty five percent? Does the prospect of having thirty percent of the industrial capacity destroyed serve as a deterrent, as could it be only twenty percent, need it be forty percent? These answers are really very difficult to reach.

HOW MANY WEAPONS DO YOU THINK WOULD SUFFICE TO MEET THAT REQUIREMENT, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS AN ARBITRARY ONE?

In the light of all this, the question is how many weapons do you need? Let me say that the recommendation of the Secretary of Defense originally was that we procure, decide to procure, I should say, a thousand Minuteman, a thousand silo-based, land-based missiles, and thirty six times sixteen sea based missiles. Thirty six Polaris submarines, each of which carried sixteen missiles. Our analysis of those figures suggested that they were at least twice too high in our judgment. The judgment of myself, Wiesner,..., others involved so that we thought perhaps five or six hundred missiles and perhaps half the number of boats or two thirds the number of boats would suffice. And that was the issue. The decision in fact was made to follow the recommendations of the Secretary of Defense.

DID YOU EVER PRESENT YOUR RECOMMENDATION TO THE SECRETARY OR TO SOMEONE WITHIN THE STATE DEPARTMENT LIKE MR...

Oh, our recommendations were discussed at great length with Dr. Enthoven, Dr. Hitch, Dr. Brown, the Secretary, the Deputy Secretary. We exchanged arguments and memoranda mostly at the staff level, that is, between myself and Enthoven and Brown. But also with the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary.

DO YOU RECALL THE MEETING WITH ALLEN ENTHOVEN WHERE THESE NUMBERS WERE DISCUSSED AND HE PRESENTED YOU WITH AGRAPH OF WHERE HIS SYSTEMS OF...ANALYSTS HAD DECIDED THAT THE NUMBERS...AND THEN YOU SAID, BUT TO THE LEFT YOU GET THE SAME SLOPE IN THE CURVE...COULD YOU RECALL THAT FOR US?

Well, the basis of the Enthoven analysis with which we were quarreling was the notion of going to the flat of the curve, because populations concentrated in the big cities, and industrial capacities concentrated in the big cities increasingly you need more and more weapons to add another five percent casualties or another five percent destruction of industrial capacity. You start at the top and you go down. So that at some point, an additional ten percent in the number of weapons starts to yield you an additional one percent amount of damage and it tails off. In Enthoven's discussions he called that 'getting to the flat of the curve.' Well the flat of the curve is again, how flat? If you talk in sort of technical language, the right of change isn't really zero, and the question is how near to zero do you want to get it? Ah, however, that's only part of the argument. Another part of the argument has to do with how many military targets there are. In addition to the notion of deterrence after absorbing a first strike, there's something in the notion of damage limitation. There's a fuzzy notion. It says if you get enough notice that the other side is going to go, you go first. And there are shades and degrees of it. There is attacking on strategic warning rather dubious notion that you somehow are assured that in two days or two weeks the other side is going to start up and you go first. There's the notion of preemption, of you hear the other fellow, so to speak, winding up his clocks and your clocks are already wound up so you go. There's the notion that as soon as you detect the signs of an attack already launched, you attack, in case the enemy, the other side has not used all his forces. All this is comprehended in the notion of damage limitation. Now, the size of the force you as—assign to damage limitation depends on your notion of the size of the enemies forces. And we, of course, at that period, had just sharply revised downwards our ideas of what the enemies forces were. As I said earlier the President campaigned on the idea of the missile gap. .... Within a fairly short time of the administration's taking office, we came to the conclusion that the missile gap had the other sign. It was we who were way ahead. And that conclusion was looked over reanalyzed the evidence was turned inside out and upside down and we were increasingly sure of it.

SO YOU WILL SAY THAT YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS TO THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE WERE BASED ON TWO NOTIONS, ON WHAT...YOU THOUGHT WAS ENOUGH... TO COMPLETE THE MISSION OF DAMAGE LIMITATION AND ALSO ON, I'M SORRY, ON ASSURED DESTRUCTION, AND ALSO ON NEWER REVISIONS OF THE SOVIET CAPABILITY. COULD YOU STATE THIS SUCCINCTLY, SO I COULD JUST HAVE...

To sum up the longer discussion, it seems to me that what we were saying was two things, One enough assured destruction to act as a deterrent after absorbing a first strike could be achieved with fewer weapons, and that fewer weapons were needed for the damage limitation element of the mission because our estimate of the size of the Soviet forces had been reduced.

VERY GOOD. THERE WERE OTHERS AT THE WHITE HOUSE WHO SHARED YOUR POSITION ON THIS.

The people who worked on this primarily as I said, were, Wiesner,..., and myself, and perhaps I should say primarily...and myself. Wiesner and Bundy who was my immediate superior, certainly participated in these discussions as did David Bell, the Director of the Budget, and Ted Sorenson, the President's speech writer and general adviser. I would say that I think we convinced all those people too, that they'd better speak for themselves. We were the ones who actually shuffled the numbers, and looked at the intelligence and made the calculations and wrangled with Alain Enthoven and Charlie Hitch. And when I say wrangled, let me add that this was not a political fight. It was a genuine discussion of intellectual issues, and which side it's safe to make the rors, the advantages and disadvantages of overshooting versus undershooting, and things like that.

OKAY. ENTHOVEN HAS TOLD US ONE OF THINGS ABOUT THIS IS THAT YOU AND THE OTHER PEOPLE THAT DECIDED ON THE LOWER NUMBERS REALLY HAD NO IDEA OF SOME OF THE OTHER PROBLEMS THAT THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT HAD TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT IN ESTIMATING THEIR NUMBERS. THAT THE FLAT OF THE CURVE, YOU COULD GO LEFT, YOU COULD GO RIGHT, THE REASON THEY WEREN'T RIGHT IS BECAUSE THEY HAD OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER. COULD YOU TELL US WHAT SOME OF THESE THINGS WERE?

Well any decision made in Washington is not merely the conclusion of a seminar. If you ask why did the numbers come out the way they did, it's insufficient to talk about simply the analysis. Every elective official is a politician. That's how he gets to be an elected official. The President must supremely be a politician to be President. In my vocabulary, that's a word of honor, not condemnation. And so every decision has a political element. The political element in this decision had to do with A, the campaign background, B, the claims of the Air Force. The Air Force pressed for higher estimates, had not accepted the conclusion that our estimates of the Soviet striking force in it's probable build up were much too high. And had asked for many more missiles than McNamara had asked for.

CAN YOU TELL ME AGAIN, PROFESSOR KAYSEN, WHAT WAS THE NUMBER OF MISSILES WHICH DEFENSE WANTED? WHAT THINGS DID IT INCLUDE, OTHER THAN ANALYSIS?

...Every important government decision is a political decision. And, among the political considerations the Secretary of Defense had in mind was, what the President had said in the campaign, what the Democrats in Congress had said during the campaign and what the Air Force wanted. The Air Force wanted many more missiles than were in the McNamara request; they never accepted the lower estimate, or, not at this time, accepted the lower estimate of the size of the Soviet forces and therefore McNamara had to consider that in making his request.

THE AIR FORCE TELLS US THAT THE REASON THEY NEEDED THOSE MANY MISSILES IS BECAUSE IF THEY HAD TO FULFILL THE COUNTERFORCE MISSION, THEY HAD TO COUNT TARGETS AND THEN HIT THE TARGETS WITH A DEGREE OF ACCURACY AND RELIABILITY. COULD YOU COMMENT ON THAT?

Well, the targeting business is a funny business. I was in the business in the second world war, when in Europe, picking targets in Germany and assessing the damage we did to them and so on. 'Course our technology was different, and we were much less efficient at destruction than we have become. But every element in this business of picking targets, especially so-called counterforce targets is guessing how many missiles do the Soviets have? How many missiles do you have to lay down on a target to get a certain level of destruction? How many missiles do you use up in what is called "defense suppression" knocking down the other side's anti-aircraft forces, basically, and the Soviet had a very big anti-aircraft force of missiles as well as airplanes. And, my own view was that the Air Force had a very wide margin of safety upwards in all those numbers, and you add those margins of safety in some place, multiply them together, and you get very large numbers. So that it seemed to me the basis on which the Air Force was asking for numbers that were perhaps as big as ten thousand just didn't stand up to an analysis.

WOULD YOU SAY THAT THE WAY IN WHICH THEY WERE PICKING TARGETS WAS ARBITRARY?

I don't think you can say that the Air Force picked targets arbitrarily; they started out with a list which would be on everybody's list, but their idea of making certain was to keep adding to the target list and another way to put this is to say that the Air Force could always find targets for as many weapons as it could persuade people to order and buy.

I'D LIKE TO SWITCH SUBJECTS NOW AND TALK A LITTLE ABOUT THE BERLIN CRISIS AND THE ROLE YOU PLAYED. YOU WERE IN THE WHITE HOUSE AT THE TIME.

I came to the White House actually in a part-time way, in March, finished out the term doing some teaching and going down to Washington whenever I wasn't in class, and came full-time at the end of May. The Berlin Crisis, in one sense, was chronic, it was going on all the time, and in another sense, it was heightened by the President's experience in Vienna, which was in May. He came back from his meeting with Khrushchev, feeling that Khrushchev's threats... were alarming; he further felt that our plans for responding to what might happen if Khrushchev attempted to make his threats good, were inadequate. And... that crisis, of revising our plans and asking ourselves, what in fact would we do if there were a military move in Berlin by the Soviets, was something that started in the end of May, beginning of June, and occupied a lot of attention during that summer.

YOU WROTE A MEMO ON JULY 3RD, 1961, TO MCGEORGE BUNDY, WHERE YOU DISCUSS THE RESPONSE OF THE CHIEFS OF STAFF TO A MILITARY PLAN. DO YOU RECALL THE PLANS THAT THE CHIEFS SUGGESTED? I CAN REFRESH YOUR MIND IF YOU NEED IT.

You, you better, because I don't recall.

OKAY... YOU TOLD MR. BUNDY IN THIS MEMO THAT THE CHIEFS HAD GIVEN BACK A PLAN OF ATTACK WHICH WAS SIMPLY THE MASSIVE EXECUTION OF SIOP '62.

Well. One part of the plan the planning, was to look at what plans we had. And the plans we had were if the, confrontation reached a military level and it started to go against us we should just let go with all our strategic forces against the Soviet Union. In fact not only against the Soviet Union, but the plans said against the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, and China as well. This seemed to many of us, and to the President, an inappropriate response. The President's instinct, and the desires of... most of the people I talked to, who were involved in this, was to make the smallest effective response, not the biggest possible response... the aim of a response was to contain the conflict, not to enlarge it.

WAS IT IN THIS CONTEXT THAT YOU SUGGESTED, ALONG WITH HARRY ROWEN, TO DESIGN OR TO WRITE A SO-CALLED "FIRST STRIKE" PLAN? COULD YOU TELL US ABOUT THAT?

One of the consequences of thinking in this way, and discussing this with Harry Rowen, who was one of McNamara's senior staff people was to ask ourselves what we could do instead of letting loose practically all our strategic weapons and aiming at targets in all the big Russian cities we asked ourselves how we could attack, really, the most important elements of the Soviet striking force.

COULD YOU LOOK AT ME WHILE... WHAT WAS THIS FIRST STRIKE PLAN? WHAT DID IT CONSIST OF?

Well. We asked ourselves how, using all the tactical weapons we had in Europe, all the carrier aircraft that we could bring to bear, the Alert aircraft in NATO, we could take out Soviet missiles and Soviet bomber bases, the most threatening elements and we also asked ourselves how we could do this to the maximum extent with the least collateral damage (that means, killing people other than the people at your targets, other than military men on the airfields, destroying urban areas). Now, the missile sites were good, they have low collateral damage. The bomber fields aren't also good; some of them have high collateral. And what we concluded, is that we could make a rather modest first-strike plan, which would disable the Soviet strategic striking forces, or limit them very sharply...What we did was very crude, and really a back of the envelope calculation. Later, the Secretary of Defense asked the, his planning staff to refine this, and make a more sophisticated and careful calculation, of what a counterforce plan on the smallest effective scale would look like.

WHAT GAVE YOU CONFIDENCE THAT SUCH A PLAN WOULD SUCCEED? WAS IT THE NEW ESTIMATES OF THE SOVIET STRATEGIC FORCES?

How confident were we that it made sense to think about such a plan? In the first place, we weren't very confident. But one element that was important is that by then, we had really identified a very small number of operational intercontinental missile sites; that is, missiles. I. the Soviet Union could hit the United States. There were a substantial number of Soviet missiles that could hit Europe, and we had to account for them too. There's some technical elements in the plan, Soviet missiles are liquid-fueled, were, all of them then; that meant they weren't instantly ready, it took them a long time to get ready, and it was possible therefore, especially using fighter bombers, aircraft based in Europe or on carriers, which had a relatively short flying time, to the Soviet Union, to get missiles before they could be made ready for launch. The question of how confident are you, that they're not being made ready for launch, not an easy question to answer. I think I should emphasize the enormous difference between making such a plan, just to see what it would look like, and thinking that it's a good idea to put it into execution. Certainly, I and Harry Rowen were not thinking it was a good idea to put it into execution; we were thinking it was a good idea to have a look at what such a plan would look like.

WAS THIS UNDERSTOOD BY PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZED THE PLAN? FOR EXAMPLE, WE'VE HEARD SORENSEN AND RASKIN, THEY HAVE TOLD US THAT THEY WERE QUITE CRITICAL OF YOU WHEN YOU SUGGESTED THIS. COULD YOU RESPOND?

One might well raise the question of whether a... the distinction between making a plan and thinking it's a good idea, to use it, is as sharp as I've just drawn it. There is an argument that says, making a plan is the first step toward using it. If you don't make it you're much less likely to use it. There's something in that argument but there are other rors that can be made. If you don't make a plan to have a small strike, and you do have a plan to have a great big strike, maybe you make a great big strike more likely. I think you have to balance off these rors — I remember some argument... with my colleagues about this, and I think maybe they weren't looking at both types of rors, and only at one type.

DO YOU REMEMBER HAVING AN ARGUMENT WITH MARCUS RASKIN ABOUT IT?

Oh, I remember having arguments with Marcus Raskin about lots of things; Marcus Raskin was, so to speak, the house critic, and his business, until perhaps he and I both got tired of it was to find things to criticize in everything we did, and that's a useful function; I don't want to down, downplay. But I think I've already said that you have to look at that cost you pay for having a plan, against the cost you play for having no sensible plan at all.

WHAT WAS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR PROPOSED PLAN AND THE PLANS THAT THE JOINT CHIEFS HAD PROPOSED FOR BERLIN?

How different was the kind of plan we've been talking about from the general plans? Now, when you talk about the general plans, you have to talk about two elements: one element is what you do on the ground to respond... The question is, what is the difference between, I'm sorry, I don't like that. It's useful to ask what is the difference between the kind of plan that Harry Rowen and I were looking at, and the plans, so to speak, in the drawer that the military already had? In talking about that you have to distinguish between two elements: One, what is the immediate response on the ground? Now we had very small forces in Berlin: a few thousand people; the Soviets had very large forces within a short distance of Berlin, they could have overwhelmed... West Berlin on the ground in a few days. And probably still can. On the other hand the question is, Suppose that happens, what do you do next? And at some level of "next," the Joint Chiefs' plan, the standard war plan, the SIOP, is to strike with essentially everything you have. And, what we were asking is, How small a strike can you make that will leave you better off, be a warning, and do only such carnage as is absolutely inevitable if you're going to use nuclear weapons at all. Let me say going from 1961 to 1986 that I'm not so clear that there's any sensible answer to that kind of question now, today, I was perhaps more enthusiastic and more optimistic, as well as 25 years younger at that time.

YOU REMEMBER THAT YOU PARTICIPATED IN SOME GAMES THAT SCHELLING PUT TOGETHER? CAN YOU TELL US SOME OF THE OPTIONS THAT WERE CONSIDERED IN THOSE GAMES, AND HOW THE SCENARIO ESCALATED IN THE BERLIN CONTEXT?

One thing that came as really an intellectual exercise in this kind of planning, and was done much later than the discussions about a different strategic strike plan was a Berlin war game. This was a game that was one side represented the United States, the other side represented the Soviet Union. I remember the game with particular pleasure because I was Khrushchev John McNaughton, man who was killed, unfortunately, at in an airplane crash, who was assistant Secretary of Defense, was,' played Kennedy; we played the game over a weekend at Camp David, very intense. And it was a game, the scenario for which was some kind of uprising in East Berlin, repeating some historical events with the West German police rushing to the help of the rebels in East Germany. And the question is, what would we do? Now the interesting part of the game is how it, was how it didn't escalate. Basically, what happened is that McNaughton and I, in the our persona as Kennedy and Khrushchev conspired to put down the revolt and return to the status quo ante. And no matter what Schelling, who was the controller, the man who fed new information into the game, did we damped it down. Now I don't know whether this tells you only that it would be better to have Kaysen and McNaughton than Khrushchev and Kennedy, or it tells you the limitations of war games, or what it tells you.

DO YOU REMEMBER WHETHER MCGEORGE BUNDY WAS AWARE OF THIS PLAN THAT YOU AND ROWEN HAD DESIGNED, AND WHAT WAS HIS REACTION TO IT?

In working on this plan, I talked mostly to Harry Rowen; it was my habit to talk with Bundy who was my immediate boss almost every day about what I was doing, what I was up to, sometimes, if he were involved, more frequently. I can't say I have a specific recollection of discussing this with Bundy although I believe I would have, just as the way I worked... with him, but I can not remember a reaction of his part, so if I did discuss it I have to say I don't remember.

YOU ALSO WORKED ON CIVIL DEFENSE. CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU DID IN RELATION TO CIVIL DEFENSE, AND WHAT WERE YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS?

The first question that was put to me when I started to work at the on the White House staff was a question about the Civil Defense program. I had... agreed to come to the White House on the 20th on the 1st of February, I'm sorry. Yeah..., I had agreed to come to the White House on the first of February; and I was still teaching. I came down as much as I could as a consultant, and the first time I met the President, he asked me whether I'd do some work on Civil Defense. And I may say that part of my World War II experience was to learn about the British civil defense system, to look at its effectiveness and ineffectiveness and to think about German civil defenses and so on. So I had some background in this business. The military, and especially the army, had put up a big civil defense program, and civil defense was an issue and had been an issue, in our defense program for some time. Originally, of course, we thought of civil defense mainly in terms of evacuation; we thought of an attack force composed of bombers, which take eight or ten hours to get here, and give us warning time, and we had a distant early warning line in Canada, we had radars in Greenland, we had all kinds of warning. Picket ships out in the Atlantic and therefore we thought if we got warning of an attack, we'd mainly evacuate people. As missiles became present and unpleasant prospect, it's clear that warning would disappear, the flight time of a missile was thirty minutes, perhaps; the flight time of a missile from, launched from a submarine could be half that or even less. The... planners, especially in the army thought about civil defense planning, in terms of shelters. Now, there're two kinds of shelters: blast shelters, the kind that you had in London or in Berlin or in Dusseldorf, When the weapons were 500-pound bombs, and a new kind suited the nuclear age "fallout shelters," which would protect you from fallout. You only suffer from blast if you're within a short distance; let's say, two or three or four miles from a bomb, you could be killed by fallout a hundred or two hundred miles from a bomb, if you were downwind of it, and the bomb was so fused as to... explode near the earth and... dig up an enormous cloud of radioactive dust. Blast shelters against 500 or a thousand-pound H-E bombs spewing out fragments of steel and so on, aren't too hard or too expensive to construct. Blast shelters against one-hundred-kiloton, or five-hundred-kiloton, or one megaton, nuclear weapons are... enormously expensive to construct. So that a blast shelter program was an unrealistically large affair. What the President asked me and several others to do, and here again I worked a lot with Spurgeon Keeney in the Science Advisor's office and another man in the Science Advisor's office, Vincent McCrae, is to answer the question, Is there any reasonable shelter program that we should undertake? The President's definition of "reasonable" had two elements in it, or perhaps three: One, something that could be done at a sensible expenditure of resources and within a measurable time that would make the situation better after you did it than it was before; second, something that didn't in itself increase the probability of war. A big blast shelter program might very well look to the other side like part of a first-strike move. You... tell people to go into their shelters as you launch your... missiles. A big blast shelter program, and I'm now talking 1961 prices, therefore multiply them by four or so, three or four would be a 50 to a hundred billion dollar program. The whole budget of the U. S. government, in 1961 prices, hadn't yet reached a hundred billion dollars. And of course a fifty to a hundred-billion-dollar program not "bango," but over a period of years. The answer to the question we ultimately gave is, It does make some sense to provide a modest fallout shelter program, by doing a number of things. Strengthening the basement of existing multi-story public buildings, providing them with some ventilation and some sensors and things like that, providing a program of stocking them and providing some kind of program of drills. This is in the end what the President recommended to Congress; it never got off the ground. The Congress was very skeptical of it; and appropriated much less money than the President asked for, and the program really didn't amount to much.

WHO WERE SOME OF THE PROPONENTS OF BLAST-SHELTER PROGRAMS?

I think of Edward Teller as a proponent of a blast-shelter program; I think of Eugene Wigner a very distinguished physicist, Nobel laureate, who was a professor at Princeton at the time and I think still is a professor emeritus at Princeton, as a proponent of a blast-shelter program; I'm not sure that these are contemporaneous reflections, that is, I'm not sure that in 1961 Teller and Wigner were saying this, although I believe they were. There were people in the Office of Defense Mobilization, and people in the office of the Chief of Staff of the Army, who were proponents of the blast-shelter program — I can't identify them individually, I really don't remember them.

WHAT ABOUT FRIENDS AND SUPPORTERS OF YOUR PROPOSAL?

Well, I don't think there were many supporters of my proposal. I worked also I should say, with Adam Yarmolinsky in the Secretary of Defense's office, on the proposal with Elmer Staats, who was the Deputy Director of the Bureau of the Budget, and another staff officer in the Budget Bureau — I believe his name was Jim Clark — on the proposal. They supported it, the President made it his program, and when the President made it his program, the Secretary of Defense made it his program. Jerry Wiesner, the President's science adviser was always skeptical; he felt that while the hardware elements of the program strengthening the buildings and getting a cheap and reasonably reliable radiation indicator and putting ventilation systems in and all that were achievable; what you might call the systems element, getting people actually to take cover, getting them to know where to take cover, keeping the food stocks fresh and not letting them molder and decay and not be replaced, naw, just wouldn't work. I've come to think that Wiesner had a better view of it than I did but I was a good bureaucrat, I was given an assignment, and I was trying to do the best job of the assignment I could do. I was struck by the fact that the President said, "Give me a reasonable program; give me a sensible one." And... one of the things that also impressed me, that Kennedy said at the time, is, "I am the President of the United States. I am responsible for the defense of the United States. I believe a nuclear war is very unlikely, but I can't believe that it's impossible. If there's anything I can do that's sensible to do, I must do it, I'm obliged to do it." And it's a hard argument to say no to. Wiesner wasn't saying no to that argument, he was saying no to the proposition that you could do it in an effective way. I may say Congressman Albert Thomas, who was chairman of the Military Construction Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, and therefore the key person in the Congress on this matter, remained a skeptic to the end. He was much unwilling to give the President the amount of money that the President requested, and the budget was always less than the President's request.

THERE WAS A GREAT OUTBURST OF HYSTERIA SURROUNDING THE QUESTION OF CIVIL DEFENSE. COULD YOU COMMENT ON THAT?

The President himself started the inquiry into civil defense; I think he soon lost his own enthusiasm for it, and partly he lost his own enthusiasm because he stirred up the public and the public overreacted. In the speech that the President made when he came back from Berlin, it was early June He announced several military moves, including calling up the reserves, and he mentioned civil defense. And this he mentioned it, he said he was going to have a civil defense program as part of his preparations probably what he said was more like, he's going to strengthen the civil defense programs, since there was one nominally in existence. This led to an outburst of excitement to people building shelters in their backyards, to business firms advertising civil defense to stories I can remember one, I believe it was in a Los Angeles newspaper, but this may be my eastern prejudices, of people talking about having guns in their shelters and repelling their shelterless neighbors if they tried to come in all that kind of talk. And it was clear that the population was very... jumpy. And this cooled the enthusiasm of Kennedy himself for the program. At one point, it was the President's intention to have a pamphlet about simple precautions that could be taken by every householder, which he, the President of the United States, would sign, and after the first outbursts of hysteria, Kennedy decided that, Mr. McNamara could send out the pamphlets, that he would rather not because he thought it was too it was too inflammatory, too creative of anxiety. Life was proposing to have a story on the civil defense program, with a big spread, and there was a lot of negotiation about what should be in it and toning it down and keeping it in a in a proper mood. I want to ask you a question.

ROLL AGAIN. OKAY.

I remember one last flicker of what you might call the impassioned view of civil defense. This was at a meeting on the defense budget, and it was the final internal meeting on the defense budget, between the President's staff and the secretary and his closest staff colleagues. It was held in Hyannis Port the day after Thanksgiving and the White House staff and the President were there, and the Secretary of Defense, deputy secretary Harold Brown, Charlie Hitch, ...Jack Ruina, who gave a briefing on ABMs and we had a discussion of civil defense. Just before the discussion of civil defense, I remember the President saying "Wait a minute, I want to get Bobby in on this." We were all sitting in the living room of Ambassador Kennedy's house, which was the biggest room available; all of us were dressed up in our Washington work clothes: coats and ties, suits and ties, and so on. Bobby had been playing football out on the lawn with the kids and his sisters; he was wearing a red jumpsuit, and I remember very vividly Bobby vaulting the rail of the porch and coming in, and the President saying, "Bobby you wanted to talk about civic defense." Bobby gave a passionate speech about every citizen's duty and everybody ought to build a shelter and so on, and the President, metaphorically and not literally, poured a bucket of cold water on him, and said, "Okay, very well, that's enough of that," in effect. So by that time it was clear that, if there was a program, it was going to be sent up; it was sent up, but it had lost that verve, that we really were going to do something about it.

IT SEEMS THAT THERE WAS A GREAT FEELING OF ENTHUSIASM AROUND THE WHITE HOUSE AT THESE MEETINGS. CAN YOU TELL ME HOW IMPORTANT IT FELT TO BE INVOLVED IN THESE ISSUES AT THIS TIME? WHAT WAS SO WONDERFUL AND REVOLUTIONARY AND EXCITING ABOUT THIS ERA?

Certainly all these... episodes, were ones which generated great excitement in me and in the people I worked with. All these, efforts, and studies and conferences and meetings and memoranda were done in a fairly intense atmosphere of hard work and long days and great excitement, great sense of involvement and enthusiasm. And there are a number of reasons for this: many of us who were involved in the campaign, I was not, felt it had been a period of the Eisenhower period had been a period of stagnation, of sort of inaction, we were activists, this was the new frontier. Kennedy was a very attractive man; he was bright, he was interested, he was responsive, it was fun to work for him. The staff was very high quality; you felt all your colleagues were bright people. Bundy, for example, was somebody I'd known for fifteen years when I went to Washington. But, most of the other people were people I'd never met before I got there, I'd met, the President once or twice, as a senator since I was a Massachusetts resident, as a member of the board of overseers at Harvard, I was a faculty member at Harvard then — but I didn't know him. I'd never met McNamara, he was a very bright and interesting man; I'd never met Harold Brown. I did know Enthoven, and Yarmolinsky, and Rowen, and Bell, but there were a lot of people I didn't know it was a very congenial and exciting group. The personal atmosphere was good; the sense of cooperation, the sense that we were a team, was high; there was... almost none of the kind of jockeying for position and status and so on, that I remember reading about in other White House staffs; it was really an easygoing and collegial atmosphere. And perhaps something that was very important. The President did generate admiration in the people who worked for him, and he treated them with both dignity and respect- And that was very important.

DID YOU FEEL WHILE YOU WERE AT THE WHITE HOUSE THAT YOU WERE AT THE FOREFRONT OF A REVOLUTION IN NUCLEAR STRATEGY, NUCLEAR THINKING. TRYING TO WRESTLE THE ISSUES OF THE NUCLEAR WORLD IN THE 1960S.

There certainly was a lot of excitement in working in these problems in the White House at the time. Part of it was that it was a lively, interesting, very bright group of people, an intellectually curious, energetic President, for whom is was fun to work. Part of it was that these were tremendously important issues of life and death for everybody. I won't say we were discovering new ideas. The ideas were ideas that have been discussed for four or five years. A lot had been discussed by the very people in the White House, who had come from..., or the Cambridge people, like Wiesner and Bundy, and myself, who had been in arms control seminars and defense seminars in Cambridge. But we were applying these ideas. It would be, I think an exaggeration to say they hadn't been thought about before. I think people like George Kistiakowsky, President Eisenhower's science adviser Thomas Gates, the last Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower administration, had begun to look and wrestle with these ideas. But we felt we had a cleaner slate to write on and we were really going to be shaping the way people used nuclear weapons, or to put it more properly, the way people thought about using them and thought about not using them, at a very crucial moment. Ah, 'New Frontier' is an attractive slogan and it was thought up as a slogan, but we certainly felt it, and we certainly felt we were at a new frontier in dealing with this terrifically important set of ideas. And for me, and I think for a lot of others, but I will speak for myself, it was exciting to think that we were not only thinking about how you might have to use these, but we were thinking about arms control too. So that we were at once worrying about the SIOP, and we were worrying about what we should be doing about arms control. And those preoccupations went together. And that was very important and it contributed to the sense that we were doing something that was new, useful, indeed vital, and exciting.