Curt Lemay

[George Govus]

Thanks to Larry Hancock for correcting my mistaken recollections of William Kelly's blog posts.

[Larry Hancock]

You are welcome George and what you posted has been repeated pretty widely over the years, it just happens that I, Larry Haapanen and a couple of other folks decided to dig into the military details over several years, including some aspects related to communications with Silver Dollar / the national airborne command post - exploring the question of whether the chain of command and communications had been broken. It led us into a lot of military and other sources not routinely visited in JFK research and those allowed us to ultimately resolve the question. 

I wrote about a good bit of that work in Surprise Attack but things still turn up from time to time, most reflecting that there was a lot more concern about the murder being part of a possible Soviet decapitation strike and precursor to a real attack than was ever expressed in the media.  What turned out to be perhaps most interesting in all of that was none of those concerns were actively discussed with Johnson, nor did he assume any CIC role that day....

[Michael Crane]

16 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

A pipe and a cigar? I never heard anyone doing that. Was that a thing? 

For the record...It sounds like I said that LeMay was smoking a pipe.

It was Jenkins that said that he himself smoked both a cigar & a pipe.

So yeah,it probably was O'Connor that asked LeMay to put the cigar out.

[Allen Lowe]

as for Lemay, LBJ thought he was involved in the JFK assassination, and told this to John Kenneth Galbraith (as reported by his son James).

[Michael Griffith]

On 3/17/2023 at 8:38 PM, Michael Crane said:

Recently corpsman James Jenkins said it was a pipe.

It was Humes that thought it was a cigar.

Didn't Paul O'Connor say it was a cigar?

Anyway, I regard Curtis LeMay as a war criminal for his actions during WWII. 

Edited March 23, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Crane]

2 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

Didn't Paul O'Connor say it was a cigar?

Yes indeed.

[Evan Marshall]

My friend also related that Lemay could not understand why they were forbidden to bomb a US auto mfg plant in Germany and why they were forbidden to bomb the rail lines leading to the death camps.