"'If you cannot learn to live with Communists,' he [Norman Thomas] told his audiences, 'then you might begin to think about dying with them.' ... 'Kennedy said that if we had nuclear war we'd kill 300 million people in the first hour,' he would declare in a typical thrust.
"Then there would be a rhetorical pause and this clincher: 'Defense secretary Robert McNamara, who is a good businessman and likes to save, says it would be only 200 million.'"
["General Curtis LeMay, whom I served under in World War II," "Robert McNamara once recalled, "said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost."]
Sources
A. Whitman, Come to Judgement; "The Fog of War" (documentary)
