Nation: BOMBER ON THE STUMP

IF you have to go," John Kennedy once said, you want LeMay in the lead bomber. But you never want LeMay deciding whether or not you have to go." The reason for Kennedy's caveat was that, like many fighting men, Curtis Emerson LeMay, 61, tends to view the world in crisp, absolutist terms Life, in his professional view, is a perpetual state of war or potential war. When he decided to join George Wallace's campaign, LeMay entered a cloudier more complex political world in which he is less at home. Said Barry Goldwater a former Air Force Reserve major general who has known LeMay for years: "I hope he hasn't made a mistake, but I think he has." There was even flak from his mother-in-law "I idolize Curt," said 91-year-old Maude Maitland a staunch Republican, "but I'm very, very disappointed. Mihai Patrichi LeMay's boss at California's Networks Electronic Corp,, declared: "Wallace is a no-good bum. He just like the dictators when they got started in Europe. May's former colleagues in the Pentagon were also worried. Said one officer: "He's not helping us one damned

Even before he retired as Air Force Chief of Staff nearly four years ago, the bluff, iron-willed flier had become involved in policy scraps that shaded into the political Most notable was his running public quarrel with then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara over whether, as thought, manned bombers should be equally important as missiles in the U.S. deterrent force. In retirement, relieved of the usual military restraints on an officer's political views, he declared that if all else failed, the US had the capability to "bomb the North Vietnamese back to the stone age" and to "destroy every work of man in North Viet Nam if that is what it takes." Such outbursts turned even formerly sympathetic military opinion against him, bidding, heavy-jowled, with a cigar customarily clenched between his teeth, LeMay unintentionally promoted his own image as a character from Dr. Strangelove,

That caricature has tended to obscure what should be remembered as a highly distinguished military career. Fro the time of his boyhood in Columbus, LeMay was fascinated with flight. At Ohio State, he busied himself with ROTC In 1928 he obtained a reserve commission and left for a National Guard summer camp. His classmates tore off to Los Angeles for weekends, but LeMay in his singleminded fashion often hung back to vivisect engines and study weather charts and navigation. With his accumulating skill as pilot, mechanic and navigator, he was summoned after seven years in fighters to fly the first of the Army's Flying Fortresses.