Hollywood's bomber baron

The screenplays of Beirne Lay Jr

The barstools on either side of the two men in the Andrews AFB Officers' Club were quietly vacated. The reckless laughter and loud "hangar flying" became perceptibly muted. The warm, mellowing effects of the alcohol rapidly wore off the officers in the club. And though the room remained comfortably dim, the three stars of an Air Force lieutenant general were unmistakable, illuminated as they were in the agreeable glow reflected by the extensive glasswork behind the bar. More foreboding still, however, was the unmistakable countenance of Gen. Curtis E. LeMay-the most influential and, arguably, the most feared USAF commander of the Cold War era. Known for his hard, seemingly cold managerial style, he had a reputation as a career-killer; a head-roller. Some called him "the Iron Eagle"; othersdetractors who feared him-simply called him "Iron Ass."

But who was the square-jawed, solidly built colonel with him? Aside from a chest full of European campaign ribbons that indicated he'd seen his share of combat, he was obviously a colonel who had the general's ear.

It was in the latter half of October 1948 when this colonel found himself in Washington, serving out his annual activeduty stint as a reservist. In later years, the now-retired colonel recalled, "I saw [LeMay] the night he landed in Washington [D.C.] from Germany, so I left a message at his office in the Pentagon-not expecting to hear from him [with] everything that he had on his mind. And, by gosh, at my motel, about six o'clock, here comes a call from LeMay.

"He said, `Let's have dinner together. I'll pick you up.' "So, we drove out to Andrews, went to the bar and everybody started edging away. All the guys in the Air Force were sort of afraid of LeMay, so we were sitting alone on these two barstools with two or three empty stools on either side. We were able to talk; he told me of all his concerns, and what he was going to have to do to get the new command, SAC, on a really operational basis."

LeMay had made a name for himself as a top-flight combat commander with the 8th Air Force in Europe and later, with the 2lst Bomber Command in the Pacific. The harddriving commander had gotten results, just as he had more recently during the Berlin Airlift in his role as commander of the United States Air Forces in Europe. On October 19, 1948, he was given a third star and command of the USAF's newly created and woefully ill-prepared and ill-equipped nuclear-bombing arm: the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Over the course of the next decade, LeMay would whip the organization, which would grow five-fold in personnel and aircraft, into a force second to none in proficiency and lethal potential.

By the early 1950s, SAC was siphoning off fully 65 percent of the newly independent USAF's annual peacetime budget. And the organization needed all the support it could muster, both internally and with the public-especially with the public. The Tactical Air and Air Research and Development Commands would battle within the halls of the Pentagon for a larger share of the fiscal pie. Meanwhile, larger, and certainly more public, budgetary battles were playing themselves out between the carrier admirals and SAC advocates before congressional committees and through the media in the form of national newspapers and television news reports in millions of homes across the nation.

Throughout this period, however, and actually much earlier, the strategic bombardment advocates, often referred to by their detractors as "well-heeled Bomber Barons," had an all-but-unseen secret weapon. He worked tirelessly with the public on their behalf, reaching and persuading innumerable American citizens-and, no doubt, their congressional representatives-as no other spokesperson for the USAF officially or otherwise ever had before.

His name was Beirne Lay Jr., the same lowly reserve colonel who so effortlessly slid onto that Andrews "O Club" barstool next to his friend, Gen. LeMay.

Lay had surely come a long way in the 29 years since he left the Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, home where he was born on September 1, 1909.

In the beginning, there was "Wings"

A career in aviation was the farthest thing from Lay's mind when, as a Yale sophomore in 1928, he took a break from his studies and caught a film with his dorm mate at the nearby Olympia Theater.

The silent motion picture featured that night was Paramount's "Wings."

"Walking home through the quiet New Haven streets," Lay later wrote, "we were just two Yale sophomores who had wasted an evening at the movies. But in one of us, that movie had lighted a spark that was to kindle dreams and spur the dreamer on to a realization of the grandest adventure a young man could have: the joy, the sweat and the tragedy of winning wings in the Air Corps."

Though Beirne Lay had questioned his chances of success in the Air Corps-for he considered himself "absent-minded, often careless ... [and] high strung"-his first real hurdle after graduation from Yale in 1931 was a weak eye muscle. Adherence to exercises and re-examination six months later, however, cleared the way for flight training at Randolph and Kelly Fields in Texas. After receiving his wings in 1932, Lay was assigned to the 20th Bombardment Squadron at Langley Field, Virginia, where he flew B-6 Keystone bombers.