Admiral GENE LaROCQUE (USN Ret.): War is a stupid way to settle differences among nations. If you're going to have problems with a nation, let's sit down before the fight starts and try to work out a solution...

...There were many people in the Pentagon when I came in '56 who still thought we ought to wage a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union, knock the hell out of them, and then accept whatever they could send to us in return.

...Vietnam was the main precipitant for my early retirement. I just wanted to get out. But I also was very much concerned by that time with the growing influence of the military-industrial complex, which was beginning to dominate the Pentagon and still is the most powerful force on the military today.

["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]

IRA SHORR: Gene LaRocque loved serving his country in the military, but quickly grew to hate war. He faced death at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, where his ship was destroyed. During World War II, he fought in numerous naval battles in the Pacific. As an admiral, he fought the Cold War as a commander of a nuclear-armed carrier task force in Europe and served as a war planner in the Pentagon.

But it was during the Vietnam War that Gene LaRocque began to question and protest his nation's military policies. Upon leaving active duty, Gene LaRocque did battle in another way -- through the democratic process as a citizen challenging Pentagon policy and as a founder of the Center for Defense Information. We spoke to Gene LaRocque at his home in Washington, D.C.

Mr. SHORR: Many boys when they're young, they have a fascination with playing war. They play soldiers. They go out in the yard and they're shooting up, bang, bang, bang.

ADM LaROCQUE: I did when I was a boy.

Mr. SHORR: You did.

ADM LaROCQUE: Sure, I did. I killed a lot of Indians when I was ten years old.

Mr. SHORR: And beyond that I read that you collected World War I memorabilia.

ADM LaROCQUE: That's true.

Mr. SHORR: You had bayonets and hand grenades.

ADM LaROCQUE: That is true.

Mr. SHORR: Were you fascinated by war and by soldiering when you were young?

ADM LaROCQUE: Sure. I thought war was an heroic event. I thought all guys who fought in wars were heros. I didn't know at age 10 or 12, or even 13 or 15 that a lot of fellows were killed during the war.

Mr. SHORR: As a kid, you don't know the realities of it though.

ADM LaROCQUE: No, that's right. It's all bang-bang, pretend stuff. But war is really a very rough business. It's vulgar, it's crude, and most of the times it's a pretty stupid way to settle differences among nations.

Mr. SHORR: In 1941, my understanding is you asked to go to Pearl Harbor and you were there when it was bombed by the Japanese, is that right?

ADM LaROCQUE: That's true. I was commissioned and they said would I like to serve for one year in the military and I said yes, indeed, I would. They said where would you like to go and I said I'd like to go to Pearl Harbor and serve on a destroyer. I didn't know what a destroyer was and I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was, but it sounded romantic.

And so, yes, when I went out to Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1941 and the Japanese woke us up on December 7th when I was aboard the USS McDonough at Pearl Harbor when they attacked us. And I must tell you that incident to that, we literally thought, I thought it was the damned Army Air Corps again which had mistakenly dropped their bombs on us until we saw the red circles on the planes, and that jolted us. And then we looked around for the man with keys to the magazine and began to shoot at the incoming attackers.

Mr. SHORR: Those words "Pearl Harbor" conger up so much, you know, it's almost mythological. What was it like emotionally during that day?

ADM LaROCQUE: Just like every combat I was ever in. It's--You're very intense. You're not frightened, I certainly wasn't. You just get in there and you fight. You find the ammunition and you try to get the targets, you try to get organized. You have a feeling in combat that somehow it's not going to kill you, at least I didn't think so.

However, after four years of fighting the Japanese, four years I stayed in the Pacific fighting the Japanese, I adopted a pretty fatalistic point of view. I figured I'm going to be killed, I just can't keep going on. My roommate was killed, ships around us were sunk in various ways, and so I figured I'd be killed. And the various landings I was on, I watched people being killed, and so I assumed I was going to be killed. You almost have to do that after a period of time, otherwise the tension is just too great.

Mr. SHORR: You came out of World War II and said you could not watch a war film for 20 years after that.

ADM LaROCQUE: I still have trouble watching a war film. It brings back memories of these kids that are being killed. One incident I was making a landing, as I said earlier, in a landing craft and we were approaching the beach and right next to me was an ensign. And he had some role, I don't remember what, and I was a lieutenant. And we were just talking with him and he took a bullet right through his tin hat. It went right through the tin hat, just poked a hole. And he just looked at me, surprised, shocked, didn't say a word and died on the spot.

Mr. SHORR: You said World War II "twisted our view of the world," meaning the United States. What did you mean by that?

ADM LaROCQUE: Well, I think more than the war, it was the victory that we thought we had achieved. We pretty well took credit for winning the war in Europe and ignoring really the significant contribution of the Soviets, and the French, and the British who fought. But it was the winning of the war that changed us.

We began after World War II to think we were omnipotent, that we were all-powerful, that we could throw our weight around in the world, and that all we had to do was brandish our guns and people would kowtow to us and we could get what we wanted. So, I think it shaped our whole view of the future.

Mr. SHORR: In a sense, we were told we were fighting communism all over the world, including in Vietnam. Now in 1967 you were asked by the secretary of the Navy to head a team of other admirals to go to Vietnam and assess the war. This was in 1967. What were you conclusions?

ADM LaROCQUE: Well, it was more than just going to Vietnam. We spent eight months, this group of admirals, trying to respond actually to Mr. McNamara's request to the secretary of the Navy, Mr. Nitze, to put this team together, and his instructions to me were simple. 'We're not interested,' he said, 'in how we got into the war, we just want an assessment of what we should do now.'

We assessed the situation in Vietnam and the world situation and it was the conclusion of all of us, unanimous, that there was no way to win that war in Vietnam, absolutely no way.

Mr. SHORR: Why did you come to that conclusion, that it couldn't be won?

ADM LaROCQUE: Well, we just measured it. It was -- It was -- It wasn't just a gut feeling. We postulated mining and found that wouldn't work. We postulated knocking out the rail lines, that wouldn't work. We postulated massive bombing, and that wouldn't work. We postulated using phony money, knocking out the -- the dikes to flood the country. We postulated the use of nuclear weapons, and that didn't work.

Mr. SHORR: Nuclear weapons. Even nuclear weapons?

ADM LaROCQUE: Nuclear weapons wouldn't have won that war because none of the supplies that were used by the Vietnamese were manufactured in Vietnam. You'd kill X number of Vietnamese and the opprobrium in the world would have been intense, but that would have put you nowhere at all because the supplies, the war materiel was coming from Russia -- the Soviet Union and China. And unless you planned to go to war with China or the Soviet Union, then there's no use dropping nuclear weapons. We actually planned it, tried it, and Westmoreland confirms that in his book, the -- A Soldier's Report.

Mr. SHORR: Now Robert McNamara, in his recent book on Vietnam, referred to this report that you came back and --

ADM LaROCQUE: Yes.

Mr. SHORR: -- drew up as, quote, "devastating" --

ADM LaROCQUE: Yes.

Mr. SHORR: -- in the sense of what it said about our inability to win the war. What happened to that report?

ADM LaROCQUE: Well, first of all, let me tell you that when I presented it to the chief of naval operations, and Mr. McNamara, and the secretary of the Navy, all there together, after I presented it, Mr. McNamara took all of our material with him right then and there. Had his aide put the -- all the drafts and everything we'd drawn, the material, under his arm and he said to me on the way out, "This is just the kind of information I need."

I take a much more sympathetic view to Mr. McNamara and his position, because a lot of people don't realize, in the Pentagon, Mr. McNamara knew only what the military was telling him and he had to operate on that basis. And I fear he was not getting full information, any more than our president over this last several years, in the last maybe 10, 12 years, maybe 15 years has been receiving from the CIA. CIA now admits they gave tainted information to the president of the United States which cost us billions. So, Mr. McNamara could only operate on the basis of the information he had and, believe me, he tried.

Mr. SHORR: And he had that information, he had that report, but I think in his book he said the president never saw it.

ADM LaROCQUE: That's right. Well, he -- we made the report to him and the Navy -- Vice Admiral Horatio Rivero, killed it. He wouldn't let me distribute it.

Mr. SHORR: You said that after that you started within the Pentagon to make yourself unpopular on the subject of Vietnam.

ADM LaROCQUE: That's true. I went everywhere. I tried to persuade people that this was a ridiculous thing. Both of my boys were in the military. I had one boy fighting in Vietnam, was -- got two Purple Hearts. I believe in the military. But this was a useless, senseless war.

Mr. SHORR: Did this lead to your eventually leaving the military? Was it over Vietnam that you left, or --

ADM LaROCQUE: No -- Well, Vietnam was the main precipitant for my early retirement. I just wanted to get out. But I also was very much concerned by that time with the growing influence of the military-industrial complex, which was beginning to dominate the Pentagon and still is the most powerful force on the military today.

Mr. SHORR: You said you were -- you were inspired in part by Dwight D. Eisenhower.

ADM LaROCQUE: Oh, absolutely. I knew John Eisenhower. John and I were together --

Mr. SHORR: His son.

ADM LaROCQUE: His son. And John would talk with his dad and I would stay with John sometimes up in Gettysburg and his lovely family. John was a very principled guy.

Mr. SHORR: What was it about Dwight D. Eisenhower that inspired you?

ADM LaROCQUE: Well, it's just the simple -- Well, first of all, he could handle the military. You couldn't fool General Eisenhower. He knew all the angles and stuff. And they couldn't come over there and bluff him and tell him what ought to be done. And he managed to keep down the military spending very low because he recognized, as many military officers did not recognize, that the spending by the military has a significant and sometimes deleterious impact on our whole national economy, on the well-being of our nation.

So, when he delivered that famous address which included the 'beware of the military-industrial complex,' I was stimulated by that. I thought for a year before I retired that I'd like to form the Eisenhower Institute. I threw stuff in a file at my desk while I was still on active duty. I wanted to fight -- wanted provide an alternative point of view to the Pentagon.

I wanted to suggest that the public ought to know more, so that they could be involved in making decisions because the Pentagon still operates in a very secretive way. They tell us what they want when they want to and to the degree that they feel is appropriate for us.

Mr. SHORR: As a war planner in the Pentagon, did it ever seem to you that things would go in reverse? In other words, the military would start with the forces they wanted or the places they wanted to be, and then develop a rationalization for having those forces or being in that certain place?

ADM LaROCQUE: It may surprise you to know that when I was a young commander in the Pentagon, my boss walked in one day and he said to me, "I need a strategic justification for (place name)." And I said, "Aye, aye, sir." And he said, "I need it in two hours." I said we'll have it in two hours.

When he left the office, when I talked to my office mates, nobody even knew what (same place name) was or where it was. We looked it up, we found it. It's a little base, a naval base in Trinidad just off the coast of Colombia. And so, I wrote him up a strategic justification for it. He came back in two hours and took it to the secretary of the Navy. Came back a little later and said the secretary likes it, we're going to keep the base open.

Now, mind you, I'd never heard of (same place name), didn't know where the base was or what it was. But that was my first experience in trying to develop a rationale to maintain the force structure and it later went to the rationale of the development of major components of our naval force.

Mr. SHORR: One of the more prominent I guess attacks or critiques of what you were doing in challenging military policy occurred when a full page ad was taken out in The Washington Times. Four-hundred and twenty-four retired admirals bought a full page newspaper ad and attacked you for appearing on Soviet television and questioning US military policy. How did that make you feel when you saw all those names on the page of people attacking your patriotism and your devotion to America?

ADM LaROCQUE: Well, first of all, I said to myself at least they're paying attention. I now have their attention and they know what I'm about. Secondly, I recognized that they were operating from the point of view that one should be totally loyal to the Navy, or the Army, or the Air Force, which I think I was. But in a grander sense, I thought I was doing what was best for the nation. And I knew that in some way they couldn't understand why I would be willing to challenge the need for a new carrier, or a new air wing, or whatever. But I did so on the basis of my experience as a strategic planner and in the long run it turned out to make a lot of sense.

Mr. SHORR: Part of your responsibilities, my understanding is, as a strategic war planner in the Pentagon was to plan for nuclear war in the height of the Cold War. How does one rationally plan for a full scale nuclear war?

ADM LaROCQUE: As soon as we had the capability to use nuclear weapons, before the Soviets had theirs, and even after they had theirs, we began to develop plans to strike them first. Well, why not, we said. Why wait until they strike us? So that we rationalized that on the basis, look, they're about to strike us any moment now. So, we'd push the button on our side and destroy them. And then when they attack us with what's left after we attack them, then we would not be damaged so much because we would have knocked out a lot of their forces.

Mr. SHORR: That's where the real danger was there, the misperceived intentions that could have launched us into a nuclear war.

ADM LaROCQUE: Absolutely right. And at that time, too, Navy ships, submarines could launch a strike without any word from Washington. Without any word from Washington, they had that capability.

When I was captain of a guided missile cruiser in the Pacific, the USS Providence, I had nuclear weapons aboard -- I think the first surface ship to have nuclear weapons. I had no restraint from the president. I could fire those nuclear weapons at any time. I had no instructions that said I couldn't.

Mr. SHORR: You could start a nuclear war without a word from the president of the United States?

ADM LaROCQUE: Absolutely. I could fire the nuclear weapons. Whether that would start a war, that's something else. I surely could fire my nuclear weapons. I had no restraints whatsoever. And submariners have always had that authority -- that is, that ability, if they thought that the attack had taken place or whatever.

Mr. SHORR: There were those that sort of promoted the "peace through strength" ideology though who said it was our keeping strong throughout the Cold War, and building more and more weapons, and challenging the Soviets all around the globe, and making them spend so much money that their economy collapsed, that that was what won us the Cold War.

ADM LaROCQUE: You know, we have great sloganeering. "Peace through strength." What a ridiculous idea. It's sort of akin to the old Roman saying that "if you want peace, prepare for war," and that's what they were saying. That's ridiculous. If you want peace, prepare for peace.

But in the United States somehow, really in my lifetime, a whole cataclysmic change has taken place where we've come to revere things military and we've come to associate patriotism with militarism.

Mr. SHORR: Why were there so few military people that came out of the military and did what you did? Many of them go to work for defense contractors or go into a nice retirement. Very few do what you did, stand outside the military as a former military person and say these things have got to be changed, we shouldn't be giving this money to the military.

ADM LaROCQUE: Well, there was nothing magic about what I did that was really so different. It was just my experience, the knowledge I acquired by virtue of my service that persuaded me that this was stupid, that we'd be much better off to work out an agreement with these folks, that there were human beings in the Soviet Union and in China, as we now know.

Mr. SHORR: You said during the Cold War that more than the Soviets being the enemy, nuclear weapons were the enemy.

ADM LaROCQUE: True.

Mr. SHORR: Who's the enemy now?

ADM LaROCQUE: Well, it's sort of like "Pogo." Took a look in the mirror and the enemy's us in many ways. We're so hooked yet on spending military -- money for the military weapons we don't need. Now I believe in a military. I believe we should have a strong military. We've got a good military. But it ought to be matched to the problem, to any potential adversary that could threaten us.

We don't have an enemy today. You look around the world of 182 countries, we don't have any enemy in the world. Nevertheless, I think we need to maintain a strong and adequate military force to do two things. One, defend the United States, and two, to assist our allies anywhere in the world who may feel threatened. If they are threatened and they don't have the capability to defend themselves, then I say there's a good reason perhaps for us to get involved. But --

Mr. SHORR: So --

ADM LaROCQUE: When you look at the world today, there aren't any enemies. There are no enemies to Japan. There are no enemies to -- to the Germans. And yet we maintain this huge military establishment in foreign countries around the world, today.

We ought to look at the situation as it exists today, structure a military force to be adequate with it, and then pay whatever it takes to have that military force. And I'm convinced that you could get along with -- by cutting our military budget by at least a third, and some people can argue persuasively we can cut our military spending in half and still have an adequate force structure.

Mr. SHORR: Yet what we see happening in Congress, particularly with Republican leadership, is that they are going in the opposite direction. They're saying we've cut the military budget so much in recent years, they want to spend $7 billion more actually than the Pentagon has requested, they say to make up for the cuts, to make up for the weapons we haven't been buying.

ADM LaROCQUE: It's ridiculous to talk about making up for the cuts. What we must do, and all military planners do, is to sit down and say, look, here are the potential adversaries. Here are their capabilities, limitations and intentions. What forces do we need to meet that capability? We ought not to put it on the basis of what we spent this year or 20 years ago, or during World War II. What do we need to spend today to provide an adequate military force to deal with the world situation? That's what we ought to be doing.

Unfortunately, a very strange twist happened some few years ago. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in their wisdom, said, look, all this service rivalry is not doing us any good, let's all scratch each other's back. If the Navy wants an aircraft carrier, fine, we'll give them an aircraft carrier, as long as the -- the Navy will go along with giving us and the Air Force some more bomber wings, and the same thing with the Army and divisions. The Army, they would agree to support the other services if, indeed, these services would support the Army. So, that unfortunate circumstance still prevails today.

So, it takes somebody in the executive branch, the president or the Congress to say wait a minute, fellas, take a look at the world, we don't need all these military forces today.

Mr. SHORR: Did you see the impact or the effect that defense contractors had on this scenario when you were in the military?

ADM LaROCQUE: Oh, yes. I had old colleagues of mine, people who had helped me along the way who are now retired and would come back and ask if I couldn't help them get a contract for their company. Sure. And we were offered to go -- tickets to sporting events offered by defense contractors, offers to go to hunting lodges, and many officers succumbed to that and to their sorrow later because it came to light. Fortunately, I'm not much into hunting and I don't much care for going to sporting events, so I was never trapped by any of those blandishments. But, sure, they try to persuade the military, they do that.

You see, this whole business of defense contractors is again something new. It's a fancy term, defense contractor. During the earlier parts of this century, munitions makers were people who built weapons. Now we call them defense contractors. And the term "munitions maker" was a term of opprobrium. It was bad, they were nasty, bad guys, the Krupps and others. They made guns that killed people and destroyed things.

Today, the defense contractors not only are the prize of our nation, they are also the major welfare queens. They are able to acquire huge sums of money to pay not only their stockholders, but the corporate executives, but also to keep themselves in business.

Mr. SHORR: And provide jobs all across the country.

ADM LaROCQUE: Some jobs. Jobs, to me, has never been a major factor. The fellow who works in the defense plant is fine. But the people who invest in defense plants know darn well they're making a profit from the American taxpayer.

Mr. SHORR: What would you like your legacy to be?

ADM LaROCQUE: I would just hope that others would carry on to kind of keep an eye on the Pentagon. Be a little skeptical of what the Pentagon is telling you. Keep in mind that they have an axe to grind.

Keep in mind, however, more importantly, that they're really wonderful people in our Defense Department. The uniformed service people are beyond parallel anywhere in the world. They are just wonderful people, dedicated. They tend, however, to get a little myopic, but that's because of the nature of their business. So, be a little skeptical. That's all I would like to leave as a legacy.

Mr. SHORR: And what do you think the American public has as a responsibility as it pertains to the military?

ADM LaROCQUE: Oh, the American public, of course, is the final arbiter here of this country as to what size and composition of spending there will be for the military, but they can't do it alone. They can't do it without knowledge. And if you only have the Pentagon there telling you what they need or the defense contractors and the Congress, without the knowledge of the actual situation, then the public can't act.

We have plenty of problems to solve in this country. We ought not to be maintaining bases in Germany, and in Japan, and in Korea. We ought to be here in the United States with our presence to improve this country. If we can be strong economically, culturally, socially in this country, we can indeed lead the world.

Mr. SHORR: Admiral LaRocque, thank you very much.

ADM LaROCQUE: It was my pleasure.

[End of broadcast.]