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Several years after his resignation from the Agency, Mr. Bissell offered some additional significant thoughts concerning the cancellation episode. During an Oral History interview for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Bissell surfaced the following information which for the first time openly revealed that the JCS may have had serious reservations about the essentiality of the air strikes. In a meeting that General Cabell and I had with Dean Rusk early Sunday even- ing, which has been described in various books, he offered us the chance to speak to the President on the telephone in his presence and seek a reversal of that de- cision. We did not take that opportunity, feeling, frankly, that the cause was hope- less. Rusk had called the President; Rusk had laid this matter before the President; Rusk had told the President that we felt very strong that this strike was a mili- tary necessity. Rusk had then stated his own reasons why, given developments in the U.N., another air strike would be politi- cally disastrous and the President, to Rusk, had reaffirmed his decision. Cabell and I felt that there really was a negli- gIble chance that we could induce the President to change his mind. Moreover, I think it has to be repeated that in some quarters, at least, there was a doubt as to whether the air attack was such an absolute necessity. Dean Rusk himself had been a participant in World " War II"operations in Burma of an irregular warfare type, and he had said on a number of occasions that operations of this sort - 273 -