Gordon F. Sander is a journalist and historian. A former Cornell writer in residence, he is the author of several works of non-fiction, including Serling and The Hundred Day Winter War, and is currently working on a book about the Cold War. He is also a contributor to the European edition of Politico.

At his press conference on March 7, 1962, President John F. Kennedy was asked by a reporter about the “confluence of strong forces,” including the conservative-dominated Congress and the United States Air Force, that were attempting to force him to revive the canceled B-70 supersonic bomber project.

Kennedy was visibly uncomfortable with the question. Still haunted by the Bay of Pigs fiasco of the year before, under fire from the right-wing for his “defeatist” foreign policy and at loggerheads with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, a little more than an year into his inchoate presidency JFK found himself facing a direct challenge to his power, and a potential constitutional crisis—all thanks to an aircraft that was still a creature of the drawing board.


Received wisdom holds that JFK’s finest hour as commander-in-chief was his adroit handling of the Cuban Missile crisis later that year, and perhaps it was. However—without minimizing the numerous foreign policy and defense mistakes JFK made during his thousand days in office—he also distinguished himself during a number of less well-known crises which tested both his powers of judgment, as well as his formidable political skills.

Of these, perhaps the most momentous was the long intergovernmental struggle over the B-70 “Valkyrie” Mach 3 bomber, which came to a head that restive spring of 1962 when the 44-year-old president and his civilian advisers found themselves in a public battle with two of the most formidable men in Washington—Carl Vinson, the crusty, long-time chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and General Curtis LeMay, the abrasive Air Force chief of staff. The outcome of the standoff would determine the future of the administration, the future of Kennedy’s defense policy and possibly the direction of the Cold War—which in 1962 seemed to be getting hotter by the moment.

“The B-70 fight was unquestionably one of Kennedy’s finest hours,” says Brookings senior fellow and military affairs expert Michael O’Hanlon. “If he had lost it, the whole picture of U.S. defense in the 1960s, not to mention our relations with Moscow would have looked considerably different.”



***

In January 1958, North American Aviation won a competition to design the Air Force’s next generation bomber. Designated the XB-70 Valkyrie, after the maidens of Norse myth who conducted heroic souls to Valhalla, the plane, it was hoped, would eventually replace the B-52 as Strategic Air Command’s main bomber and backbone of the nation’s defense.

And on paper, the B-70 looked great. Employing the little-known aerodynamic concept of “compression lift,” whereby six huge engines encased in a box structure beneath the fuselage would force compressed air away from the plane’s wide triangular wings, the new, nuclear-missile bearing aircraft would be able to fly at 2,200 miles per hour—more than three times the speed of sound—and attain a maximum cruising speed of over 80,000 feet, making it the fastest and highest flying bomber ever built.

The XB-70 at its rollout at North American Aviation in California. | Getty

One of the plane’s biggest advocates was LeMay, the former commander of the Strategic Air Command and current Air Force vice chief of staff. To LeMay, who was the model for the bomber-loving General “Bud” Turgidson character in Dr. Strangelove memorably played by George C. Scott, the Valkyrie represented the future of air power at a time when it was increasingly being overshadowed by the ballistic missile. He wanted 150 B-70s for his Air Force, so that the aircraft could form an aerial picket line around the Soviet Union. Armed with missile-launched nuclear warheads, the B-70 fleet LeMay envisioned would be in a position either to retaliate against the USSR with overwhelming annihilating force, as per the massive retaliation doctrine which then dominated American defense policy—or to launch a preemptive first strike of overwhelming annihilating force against the USSR at a moment’s notice.

At LeMay’s urging, Air Force Chief of Staff Thomas White immediately placed a crash order with North American Aviation to build 45 of the new bombers, which cost $750 million each. The sizable air power contingent on Capitol Hill, including the very vocal senator and reserve air force major Barry Goldwater—who extolled the B-70 as “a triple-sonic missile with a brain”—gladly assented, and the House Armed Services Committee allocated several hundred million dollars to begin development and production of the projected Valkyrie fleet. “The Valkyrie,” they chorused in speeches and articles and speeches, “must fly.”

One of those who wasn’t so taken with the pterodactyl-looking aircraft or the rhetoric of its backers was President Dwight D. Eisenhower. By the late 1950s, Ike had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the rigidity and provocativeness of the country’s massive retaliatory strategic posture, and the concomitant atrophying of the country’s other armed services and capability to contest the Communist bloc in limited or ‘brushfire’ wars. Aside from the Valkyrie’s questionable airworthiness, Ike and his advisers felt that pouring so much money into building more strategic bombers, designed as nuclear-strike weapons, put him into something of a straitjacket.

Consequently, in 1958, the Eisenhower administration decided to downgrade the B-70 project to an aerodynamic research project, limiting production to two prototypes, while maintaining the option of upgrading it to a full weapon production system to appease its backers. The following year, Ike went further, scaling back the program to one air frame and refusing to spend the additional monies which Congress allocated to buy more B-52 and B-58 bombers.

After every one of Eisenhower’s roadblocks there came a progressively greater hue and cry from the Air Force-Congress combine, followed by an intense propaganda campaign to get the Eisenhower administration to release the coveted monies. While high ranking Air Force officials like Chief of Staff Thomas White hit the high notes, emphasizing the vaunted superplane’s aerodynamic features, aging air power swamis like General Carl Spaatz, head of the Army Air Force of World War II fame, were wheeled in in to sound the low, ominous ones. “The decision to delay indefinitely the development of the B-70 bomber represents, I believe, is the most serious mistake in weapons evaluation the U.S. could make at this juncture of the global armaments contest,” Spaatz declared in December, 1960.

Ike did not budge. No slouch on military matters himself, the former Allied supreme commander had a constitutional aversion to the sort of saber-rattling White, LeMay and Spaatz engaged in. It was concerns such as these which moved the retiring president and commander in chief to dedicate his farewell address in January 1960 to warning the nation about the dangerous consequences of having such a large, self-perpetuating peacetime military establishment.



***

The B-70’s backers in the military-industrial complex thought that they might find an ally in Eisenhower’s successor, but Kennedy had heard Ike’s warning. “Neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation and certainly not our economy,” the new commander-in-chief told Congress shortly after taking office, “must become dependent upon the military establishment.”

And in February 1961, just two months into his term, Kennedy decided to phase out the Valkyrie, asking Congress for the monies to build the two prototypes Ike had OKed, but explicitly ruling out ramping up the untested bomber to a full weapons system.

Siding with his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Kennedy decided, on sober reflection that he didn’t want to spend any more money on a plane that, at a time when both intercontinental ballistic missile and surface-to-air missiles were becoming more accurate and sophisticated, looked like the lumbering vehicle of an outmoded age. Additionally Kennedy, who wished to step back from the nuclear brink, had an aversion to a weapon that was geared for a first strike—which undoubtedly is how Moscow would have viewed the nuclear-armed battlewagons circling its airspace. Shifting to a less provocative “counterforce” posture, JFK preferred to put money into weapons systems, such as the hardened ICBM and the submarine-launched Polaris missile, which could survive an initial nuclear attack and then retaliate.

Predictably, LeMay, whom Kennedy had promoted to Air Force chief of staff the year before, after cashiering the belligerent Thomas White after the Bay of Pigs disaster, was less than pleased. Meanwhile the general had no qualms about advancing the cause of Air Power, while undermining his bomber-averse civilian superiors, at least behind Washington’s closed doors, during the fraught fall of 1961 as syndicated columnist Marquis Childs wrote that November.

“A small incident illumines the atmosphere of this capitol,” Childs wrote. “At a Georgetown dinner party the wife of a leading senator sat next to General Curtis LeMay,” Childs wrote. “[LeMay] told her that a nuclear war was inevitable. It would begin in December and be all over by the first of the New Year. In that interval, every major American city would be reduced to rubble. He told her that certain unpopulated areas in the Far West would be the safest. The senator dismissed this as flesh-creeping which ‘Curt’ resorted to at appropriations time.”

If a little flesh-creeping was required to help LeMay get his bomber, so be it. Obviously such antics did not endear the former SAC commander with the Kennedy administration. As far as LeMay was concerned, the ends—being prepared for the war that was certain would come—justified the means. As McNamara later put it: “LeMay’s view was very simple. He thought the West and the U.S. in particular were going to have to fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union and he was absolutely certain of that. Therefore he believed we should fight it sooner than later, when he had a greater advantage.”

Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Alain Enthoven, who worked on the B-70 project, perhaps best expresses his civilian bosses’ view of the famed airman. “[We] admired [LeMay’s] achievement in building and leading the Strategic Air Command,” says Enthoven, now a professor emeritus at Stanford. “It was quite an achievement putting all that together into an effective fighting force. But,” he adds drily, “that did not make him an authority on grand strategy.”

Kennedy made clear his discomfort with LeMay’s world view at a news conference on February 14, 1962. Asked by a journalist what his response was to critics who claimed that the administration’s “defeatist” foreign policy was based on the premise that nuclear war was not winnable, he responded, “if someone thinks we should have a nuclear war in order to win, I can inform them there will not be winners of the next nuclear war if there is one.”

Sen. John Kennedy is pictured with General Curtis LeMay, vice chief of the Air Force (center), and General Thomas S. Power, SAC commander (right). Kennedy arrived for a military briefing at the SAC base in August 1960. | Getty

In the meantime, Kennedy had developed something of an aversion to the cigar-chomping air general himself. Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, who had the job of escorting the Air Force chief to the White House for his infrequent conferences with the president, recalled what happened when Kennedy and LeMay met. “Every time the president had to see LeMay,” Gilpatric told the JFK Oral History Project, “He would end up in a fit. I mean he would be frantic. LeMay would make what Kennedy considered outrageous proposals that bore no relation to the state of affairs in the 1960s. And [JFK] had to sit there. I saw the president right afterwards. He was choleric, just besides himself.”

One gathers that Kennedy’s meeting with LeMay on February 23, 1962, went something along those lines. Once again, as he had in prior meetings with his commander-in-chief, LeMay wanted to discuss the B-70, or the RS-70—RS standing for reconnaissance-strike, as Air Force staff had re-named the endangered bomber in order to persuade their civilian bosses to make it a full weapons system. (A reconnaissance aircraft could be considered a “second strike” weapon. The trouble with that argument, Neil Sheehan writes in A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, “was that if the B-70 survived Soviet surface-to-air missiles the crew would not be able to see anything on earth while flashing across the stratosphere at more than 2,000 miles an hour and 14.2 miles high.”)

Kennedy, straining to keep his temper, responded that he had full faith in McNamara’s judgment. The president was OK with building the two prototypes the Defense Department had recommended. But whatever the Air Force called the aircraft, there would be no 150-strong Valkyrie picket line. As far as both JFK and his defense secretary were concerned, ballistic missiles could do the job of protecting the nation as well as the manned bomber, if not better, and for more bang for the buck.

As LeMay’s biographer, Warren Kozak put it, “LeMay left the meeting frustrated.”

Now it was time for the Iron Eagle’s chief legislative ally to weigh in.



***

Like LeMay, Vinson, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was intent on rescuing the B-70. But while he was worried about the future of air power like LeMay, Vinson also had another motive in pursuing the B-70 fight. Dubbed “Swamp Fox” after wily American Revolution guerrilla and fellow southerner Francis Marion, the Georgian congressman saw the aircraft as an ideal way to reassert Congress’s role in determining the nation’s defense posture—especially now that a new, green president was in office.

Who had the ultimate power to shape the country’s defense posture, Congress or the White House? Vinson, then a feisty 78, was adamant that Congress—and he—had that power, and the pugnacious congressman, whose cunning had helped him win many a previous intergovernmental skirmish, was eager to fight the White House over it. Challenging Ike, the universally revered and respected former Supreme Allied Commander, on national security issues had been one thing. Ike was Ike. Who was John Kennedy in March 1962, though, but a former naval lieutenant whose qualifications as steward of the nation’s defense were still in doubt? Now, the Swamp Fox decreed, was the moment to strike a simultaneous blow both for air power and for Congress’s own piece of the geostrategic pie.

And so, on March 1, 1962, several days after LeMay’s frustrating encounter with the president, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), at Chairman Vinson’s direction, voted unanimously to “direct and require” the Kennedy administration to spend $491,000,000 more than the administration had requested to “proceed with production planning and long-lead time procurement for an RS-70 weapons system.” In the report accompanying the 1963 appropriations bill, the HASC repeatedly cited as the basis for its unprecedented action the nebulous clause in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution which gives the Congress the power to “raise and support” military forces.

Vinson’s report had escalated the B-70 fight into a constitutional showdown and reopened a quandary that had been dividing presidents, legislators and assorted thinkers ever since the days of the founding fathers: The president might be commander-in-chief, yet in order to exercise his powers, or even to subsist, he must have money, which the Congress alone can provide. So who’s really in charge?

Vinson made his position clear: If the combative language of the “directive” he fired at the White House on March 1 “constitutes a test as to whether Congress has the power to so mandate,” Vinson declared, “let the test be made and let this important weapons system be the field of trial.”

Rep. Carl Vinson in his House office in 1962. | Getty

Suddenly Kennedy found himself in a humiliating Mexican stand-off with one of Washington’s most venerated and powerful congressmen on an issue that directly related to both his standing and prerogatives as commander-in-chief. As Hanson Baldwin, military analyst of the New York Times wrote the following day, by acting as proxy for LeMay and the manned bomber lobby, Vinson had posed “an unprecedented challenge to the principle of the executive control of the military.”

“This was more than just a fight over a bomber,” Theodore Sorenson, JFK’s special counsel, later wrote, in his memoir, Kennedy. “Never before had the Congress sought to tie the president’s hands on a discretionary military matter in this fashion.”

And of course it wasn’t just the future of the presidency that hung in the balance. JFK and McNamara were struggling to convert U.S. defense to a less provocative and more cost-effective “counterforce” or limited war posture. If Vinson managed to force the Kennedy administration to throttle up the Valkyrie, such a recalibration would be difficult, if not impossible. LeMay and his fellow bomber generals’ Strangelovian belief that nuclear war was winnable, even inevitable, would then prevail. And the Kremlin, which was watching the intergovernmental warfare over the B-70 with interest—and where Khrushchev was also straining to keep a leash on his hard-liners—might well react accordingly. Who could say, after all, that the Russians would wait for the poorly disguised first strike weapon to be produced en masse before deciding to launch such a strike against the U.S. themselves?

“The B-70 was more than a fight over whether to fund a particular weapons system,” says O’Hanlon. “It was in addition to the cost-effectiveness issue, a proxy fight between two philosophies of war, one, represented by LeMay, which held that a nuclear war was winnable, and another, represented by Kennedy and McNamara, which said that it wasn’t.”

Little wonder that Kennedy looked tense at the March 7, 1962, press conference when he was asked about the B-70. He was also livid—so much so that he had prepared a public retort of his own. “As Commander in Chief,” JFK wrote in advance, “the president has the responsibility for the deployment and use of troops, including the weapons which they employ. I do not believe that it is the proper exercise of the Congressional responsibilities to prescribe by law the timing and development of a specific weapons system.”

Still, the last thing Kennedy wanted or needed was a public confrontation with the formidable Vinson, who in addition to sabotaging the administration’s defense policy, also had the power to stymie Kennedy’s domestic legislative program. And so his riposte was pocketed. As James Reston wrote in the Times, “Kennedy would rather go to the summit with [Soviet premier Nikita] Khrushchev,” who had embarrassed JFK at their gnarly June 1961 summit in Vienna, “than go to the mat with Vinson—“not because he fears Vinson’s argument” but because of Vinson’s ability to “blow up” JFK’s medical care and trade bills.

Meanwhile both the general media and the aviation and science media continued to add their voices to debate. “THE VALKYRIE MUST FLY!” had read the cover of a typical August 1961 Reader’s Digest article. “LeMay charges U.S. is losing its strategic force superiority,” cried the headline of an article in the March 5 issue of Aviation Week.

The fuse on the political bomb which Vinson had effectively lit by with his “directive” to the White House was set to go off on March 22, when the House would vote on the 1963 military appropriations bill containing the new funds for the B-70—a vote Kennedy was certain to lose. After that, further political mayhem was sure to ensue, including theoretically, if Kennedy continued to stick to his guns and refused Congress’ directive to spend the new funds for the Valkyrie, Kennedy’s impeachment. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible.

If Kennedy was going to prevent the Valkyrie from taking off—and along with it his administration’s control of U.S. defense policy—he would have to “go to the mat” with Carl Vinson, or do something, before March 22. In public both sides stuck to their guns—and a smash-up between the legislative and executive branches seemed inevitable. On Wednesday, March 14, a week before the climactic vote, McNamara returned to the House and made an impassioned two and a half hour statement before the Vinson committee in which he reiterated his arguments against reviving the Valkyrie.

Vinson and his fellow committeemen were unmoved. Afterwards, Vinson reiterated, “We will be fighting for [the B-70] strong when the bill comes up on the House floor next Wednesday.”

How, Washington wondered, would it all end?



***

It ended with a walk in the Rose Garden.

It was time for JFK to unleash his secret weapon—his charm. On Monday, March 19, 1962, two days before the pivotal vote on the appropriations bill, Vinson received a call from Speaker of the House John McCormack. “The president indicated that he wanted to talk this thing over with you,” McCormack said to the surprised congressman. An appointment was made for 3:30.

At the designated time, Vinson was led into the empty Oval Office. A few minutes later, McNamara arrived, followed by the president. Kennedy, who had served in the House for six years before he became a senator in 1953, addressed Vinson deferentially as “Mr. Chairman.”

“This whole thing has gone too far,” Kennedy remarked, as the president’s aide Theodore Sorenson later recollected. “Couldn’t we send you a letter that you could make public,” the president suggested, “underlining the powers of the legislature and the importance of the manned bomber program, while allowing the administration to proceed with its own weapons procurement plans?”

Without replying, the elderly legislator pulled out a draft of such a letter. “That’s where you got the name ‘Swamp Fox!’” Kennedy said amidst general laughter. Still, Sorenson and Kennedy’s other aides were unhappy with the draft, which they felt did not adequately articulate the president’s military procurement prerogatives. Impatient, and feeling that a spot of personal diplomacy might help put a cap on things, Kennedy turned to the congressman and said, “Mr. Chairman, let’s go for a walk in the garden.”

And so, on that sunny spring afternoon, the two erstwhile adversaries went strolling through the Rose Garden. No one knows exactly what Kennedy said to Vinson during their walkabout, but whatever it was, it was enough to get him to formally strike his colors.

When the pair returned, Vinson approved a new version of the report accompanying the Armed Services Committee’s recommended budget, in which the chairman agreed to remove the HASC’s provocative directive. Now the House would merely “authorize” the expenditure of funds on the B-70. In return the Pentagon promised to reopen and restudy the “issue.”

The short-lived, but explosive constitutional crisis was over. There would be no collision between Congress and the White House after all—at least not over Valkyrie.

The next day, standing proudly in the well of the House, Vinson insisted that he had won. “They have gotten the message,” he cried, referring to the White House and the Defense Department. “They know that Congress is not just talking, but that we mean business. So we can congratulate ourselves.”

However neither Vinson nor his adherents were really in the mood for celebration. Wisely, Kennedy chose not to rub it in when he was asked about the surprisingly pacific resolution of the B-70 crisis at his next news conference two days later. “Mr. President,” the Times’ Reston asked, “I understand that an exchange of letters at the summit has settled the question of the B-70 or the RS-70. Can you tell us who won what and from whom?”

“Well,” Kennedy answered, “I think that if you took the power of the Executive and the powers of the Congress and pushed each to its logical, or at least possible conclusion, you would have a government of divided powers [and] a somewhat chaotic situation.” He concluded: “In my opinion, I think there was no winner or loser except, I think, the relations between Congress and I think in the public interest.”

Then the president turned to take the next question. And that, essentially, was the last time Kennedy discussed the B-70 controversy in public—which helps explain why this Byzantine episode has fallen between the historical cracks.



***

So, what, then, ultimately, was the significance of the B-70 fight? What would have happened if Kennedy had buckled under to the B-70 lobby and agreed to greenlight production of the much-vaunted “Superbomber?”

“The consequences would have been a great weakening of the authority of the president and the secretary of defense,” states Enthoven unreservedly. “I think Kennedy handled it very well,” he says, “standing firm behind McNamara.”

“Of course, this is conjectural, but my guess is that the consequence would have been an intensified arms race,” says O’Hanlon. “It—the B-70—certainly would have wasted a lot of money and solidified the power and influence of those who felt that nuclear war was winnable, including and especially LeMay.”

“Whether producing the B-70 en masse would have in itself led to another war is speculative, but it certainly would have pushed the nuclear clock closer to midnight,” adds O’Hanlon. “In that sense, and because it gave Kennedy the confidence to overrule LeMay later during the Cuban crisis, when he urged an airstrike on Soviet missile launchers—a move which might well have led to nuclear war—I think the B-70 fight was certainly one of Kennedy’s finest hours.”

And what of the Valkyrie?

The XB-70 Valkyrie prototype flies with a fighter escort over the United States in June 1966. | Getty

The two prototypes JFK signed off on were ultimately produced—and they did fly, for a time. The No. 1 XB-70 made its initial flight on September 21, 1964, and successfully executed a Mach 3 flight on October 4, 1965, a few months after LeMay retired from the Air Force. No. 2 had a more checkered history, suffering a mid-air collision with an escort jet over the California desert and crashing into smithereens, killing one of the B-70’s co-pilots and the pilot of the escort fighters.

After making several additional research flights, the surviving Valkyrie was flown to the U.S. Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. There it remains, in one of the museum’s hangars, its immense hundred foot wingspan overshadowing such other aeronautical dodos as the doomed Bell X-5 and the misguided Ryan X-13 “Vertijet.” A sign attached to it calls it “the world’s most exotic airplane.”

Otherwise, the world’s most exotic airplane and the dramatic constitutional fight it set off seems to have faded from the history books.

But McNamara certainly hadn’t forgotten about the B-70 when I asked the retired defense secretary about it 30 years ago.

“Oh, the B-70,” he exclaimed. “Do I remember it? There was blood on the floor!”