It was a very different time, the immediate post-Eisenhower years. The Chiefs, who were held over from the previous Administration (generals who believed in a more balanced posture, like Ridgway and Taylor, had been either winnowed out, or more or less ignored), were men who believed that nuclear war was a viable kind of military position; indeed, the entire American military posture was essentially based on a willingness to use nuclear weapons. That was an eerie-enough thought, and some people wanted to crawl away from it. Men such as Henry Kissinger, then of Harvard, had just made himself
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