In October 1962, a few days after the United States had stood, in Adlai Stevenson’s famous phrase, “eyeball to eyeball” with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy invited the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Oval Office to express his appreciation for their role in managing the two-week standoff. Among them was Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff who had pushed for immediate airstrikes and a full-scale military invasion of Cuba, and had, to Kennedy’s disbelief, claimed that in the event of such an attack the Russians would not respond militarily.
LeMay, wrote journalist Richard Reeves in “President Kennedy: Profile of Power,” told his commander in chief he didn’t need Kennedy’s gratitude. “We lost!” he said. “We ought to just go in there today and knock ‘em off!” The peaceful resolution to the crisis, which had brought the world close to nuclear conflict, was “the greatest defeat in our history,” LeMay added, according to historian Robert Dallek.
Kennedy considered the general unhinged. But now, more than 60 years later, it feels as if LeMay has somehow returned to take possession of American foreign policy — and Donald Trump himself.
Kennedy considered the general unhinged. But now, more than 60 years later, it feels as if LeMay has somehow returned to take possession of American foreign policy — and Donald Trump himself. During the president’s primetime address about the Iran war on April 1, he threatened to blow the Islamic Republic “back to the Stone ages,” words that are a direct echo of LeMay’s famous quote from the Vietnam War. Intentional or not, the phrase marked a distinct escalation of threats coming from Trump against Iran culminating in a statement issued Tuesday morning that was, coming from a president of the United States, unprecedented in its depravity.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
Trump’s words set off a tidal wave of global anxiety and outrage. Just 90 minutes before his deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. Eastern time expired, he announced the U.S. and Iran had struck a deal for a two-week ceasefire. In this whiplash media environment, news of the fragile agreement, which is reportedly already cracking, is now threatening to consign the president’s threat of annihilation to memory — or to dismiss it, as some Republicans, commentators and MAGA influencers are already doing, as simply a blunt-edged negotiating tactic that proved successful.
But we as a nation cannot allow this moment and what it represents to pass. Never before has an American president threatened to annihilate 93 million civilians, let alone a society that, for all its “extortion, corruption, and death” over the past 47 years, has shaped civilization for the better across two millennia. What we witnessed Tuesday morning from the commander in chief was a war crime in the making, written in language that smelled of genocidal bloodlust. It was an outright betrayal of what we have understood to be America’s values.
Two hundred fifty years ago, the “truths” Thomas Jefferson laid out in the Declaration of Independence were not yet “self-evident,” as Elaine Pagels pointed out in a recent essay. That famous wording is itself a tell, a rhetorical device pointing to the fact that the emerging revolution’s values needed to be articulated in writing. Underscoring the document was a radical notion: that everyone — later revealed in the Constitution to be, in the framers’ eyes, land-owning white men — has value and that, for better or worse, by “consent of the governed,” we are all in the American experiment together.
As democracy in the U.S. evolved over the next two centuries, that social contract was widened and refined to not only include the people the founders had excluded, but also to encompass ideals of fair play, sacrifice for the common good and proportionality in conflict.
This week, those values were best summarized by Christina Koch, one of the astronauts on NASA’s Artemis II mission to orbit the moon. After the crew had endured a 40-minute planned blackout while on the far side of the lunar body, she spoke of future NASA missions to establish a presence there. “But ultimately,” she concluded, “we will always choose earth, we will always choose each other.”
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They are also the ideals that Kennedy aspired to uphold at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis and, 10 months later, when he signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union and Great Britain. LeMay, predictably, was “solidly opposed” to the treaty, arguing it would impede military readiness and constrain America’s nuclear capability.
The Air Force general represents an entirely different philosophy that has, it must be said, always existed in American life and must be acknowledged in any discussion of American exceptionalism: outright nihilism. A belief, in this case, not in nothing but that the ends always justify the means.
Eighty years after the end of World War II, historians and ethicists continue to debate the Allied bombing of Dresden, or Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (for which LeMay, as commander of B-29 Superfortress combat operations against Japan, gave the final order). But as horrific and deadly as these actions were, they can at least be contextualized as part of a world war in which America’s enemies were in the process of slaughtering over 400,000 of its soldiers.
No such argument could have been made had Trump followed through with his threat against Iran, and no coherent defense can be given for even raising the possibility in the abstract. His words were an anomaly in the history of presidential rhetoric.
Even Richard Nixon in his darkest, and sometimes drunken, moments had the good sense, or at least the protection afforded by his aides, to keep his most sadistic thoughts private.
American presidents have issued stern warnings to the country’s adversaries before. Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” a phrase considered shocking and inflammatory when he said it in 1983 but that to our ears, which have become conditioned to vile rhetoric in the age of Trump, seems positively gentle. Nearly 20 years later, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, George W. Bush referred to Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” alleging that those countries were systemic sponsors of state terrorism and were pursuing weapons of mass destruction. “I will not wait on events while dangers gather,” he declared to Congress, laying the groundwork for preemptive action. “I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer.” Even Richard Nixon in his darkest, and sometimes drunken, moments — such as when he proposed to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger dropping a nuclear bomb on North Vietnam that would “destroy the god***n country” — had the good sense, or at least the protection afforded by his aides, to keep his most sadistic thoughts private.
Not so Trump who, according to his own chief of staff, has an “alcoholic’s personality,” traits of which can include recklessness, emotional instability, mood swings and a lack of impulse control. By the president’s own admission, the war in Iran is “exciting” — a lark he has rated as 15 out of 10 in terms of the pleasure he is deriving from it. He has failed to mention how the 13 dead American service members and their grieving families would rank the war. One would also presume that the 175 Iranians, most of them children, who were slaughtered by what appears to be an American bomb in the Feb. 28 attack on an elementary school in Minab, and thousands more of the country’s civilians who have been killed, would not share in Trump’s sense of “fun” and excitement.
Neither, for matter, did Iranian civilians who must have spent the 10 hours between the president’s threat and announcement of a ceasefire preparing to die. Or America’s allies in the Middle East and Europe, who are well within range of Iranian missiles. Or residents of Washington, D.C., and New York City, who would — and still could be — on the frontlines of a retaliatory terrorist attack from splinter groups or a lone wolf supporting the Islamic Republic.
Barely 50 minutes after Trump made his threat on Tuesday morning, military planners at the Pentagon were examining target lists and preparing to strike. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said, “The entire Department serves at the direction of the President and will execute his military objectives without fail.”
Meanwhile, millions around the world were praying that the president of the United States was not a deranged madman.
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In “The Fog of War,” Errol Morris’ Academy Award-winning documentary that examines Robert McNamara’s conduct during the Vietnam War, the former secretary of defense reflected on America’s conduct in Japan during World War II. He quoted LeMay, who in addition to his role in deploying the atomic bombs, oversaw the firebombing of Japanese cities. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals,’ and I think he’s right.”
Donald Trump is a war criminal in the making. In a different, better time, he would be impeached and removed from office by Congress for raising the specter. Even the likes of former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and MAGA influencer Candace Owens are calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked by Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s Cabinet.
That will not happen.
But as Americans, we owe it to ourselves, our children and, most of all, our country, to not allow the White House or the Pentagon or the frenetic news cycle to brush past the president’s genocidal statement. While he is not a traitor in the constitutional sense, he has betrayed the values of the country he purports to serve.
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