If you've seen the classic Stanley Kubrick film "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," you're familiar with Gen. Curtis E. LeMay — sort of. The four-star Air Force general didn't personally appear in that 1964 movie, but two of its most memorable characters were based on him: The cartoonishly bellicose Gen. Buck Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, who practically salivates at the prospect of dropping bombs on the Soviet Union, and Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, a cigar-chomping madman who embraces every far-right conspiracy theory in sight.
Kubrick and the film's writers created the archetype of the warmongering extremist based on LeMay — and four years later, LeMay unintentionally proved them right by acting exactly like his fictional counterparts. The stakes could hardly have been higher when he did so: LeMay was chosen as vice-presidential running mate for George Wallace, the white supremacist Alabama Democrat whose 1968 third-party campaign nearly threw the presidential election into chaos. For a brief moment, it seemed that a Kubrickian caricature might come disconcertingly close to the Oval Office. Yet one seven-minute press conference wound up pretty well demolishing LeMay, and probably ending any chance Wallace had of winning. One could argue that the general revealed the Achilles' heel of far-right politics — a tendency to succumb to beliefs that literally threaten the survival of our species and the world.
