The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  In 1968 he had gone to the World Bank—a job which was the very antithesis of his previous position as head of the greatest war machine in the history of the world, an act which seemed to some to have a touch of penance in it. He was willing to reminisce with old friends about the Defense years, with the exception of one subject which never came up, Vietnam. It still caused him pain and would not go away; there were reminders everywhere of what it had meant. Nor was the split in his own family a unique illustration of what the war had done to this country, in home after home: in the Robert McNamara family there was Bob McNamara, who was one of the great architects of the war, while in 1970 one of the leaders of the California peace movement, attending rallies everywhere, radical, committed, was his young son Craig.

  He was very much in place among the Kennedy people, for they were rationalists all; they did not really dissent from the Eisenhower years, but as they entered office, had pledged to make the new Administration more effective. They would speed it up, make it work better, cut the flab off. For the cool, almost British young President, he was an ideal Secretary of Defense. He was not of the Establishment in the sense that Bundy was, nor had he served it the way Dean Rusk had, clerking all those years first in the State Department, then at the Rockefeller Foundation. Detroit was not part of the Establishment, but it was part of the functional structure, a place to be watched, its figures scanned by the Establishment to be sure that it could still outproduce Moscow and Berlin in heavy cars.

  But if he was not of the Establishment, he had done his time and served well under Bob Lovett in the Air Force during World War II. McNamara was a man to take note of even then; one was sure he would be seen again, and his uncommon qualities, the skill and perseverance, brilliance and selflessness were not forgotten, and fifteen years later when Lovett, who had turned down Defense himself, was asked for names, he immediately mentioned McNamara, whose bright future had been realized. McNamara had kept straight ahead and had gone on to greater things at Ford; they had just made him president. Actually, he had first come to public attention in 1947 (though not by name), his achievements boasted about in a Fortune magazine article on Lovett. When Kaiser wanted to ferry all cargo by flying boats to overseas bases, Lovett had proved that it would require 10,022 planes and 120,765 aircrews to move 100,000 long tons from San Francisco to Australia, whereas the same task was already being handled by 44 surface vessels manned by 3,200 seamen. As casualties rose during the war, the article pointed out, Lovett had instituted Stat Control (Statistical Control Office), a world-wide reporting service anchored by a battery of IBM machines which produced life-expectancy estimates for every member of every aircrew. The idea was to prove to an airman that he had a 50-50 chance to come home while the war was still going on, and an 80 percent chance for survival. Eventually it became so efficient that it could predict how many planes would be available in every theater every day for every operation. It was, said Fortune, “super application of proven business methods to war, and so successful that a few months after hostilities ceased, the Ford Motor Company hired the two principal operators.” Thus McNamara entered on the scene, an imaginative and able cog in an enormously successful machine: business methods applied to war.

  After the 1960 presidential election, the call went out from the talent scouts to the Ford Motor Company. Actually they had made contact even earlier, during the campaign. Neil Staebler, chairman of the Democratic party in Michigan, had suggested to Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver that his friend Bob McNamara should head the businessmen’s committee for Kennedy-Johnson, a job for which they were not exactly overwhelmed with applicants. Staebler pointed out that McNamara typified the new liberal businessman with the broader horizon, had considerable prestige among his colleagues throughout the country, had voted for Democrats in the past and came from the prestigious house of Ford. Shriver, a big-game hunter, liked at least part of the idea, Ford, but thought if we go for Ford, we’ll go for the top, we’ll get Henry himself, a decision which lacked only Henry’s concurrence.

  Somehow the McNamara idea was lost in the shuffle, but in December, Shriver, now in charge of the recruitment drive, called Staebler again: “How did your friend McNamara vote?”

  “For Kennedy, I think.”

  “Could you find out?”

  “Why?”

  “Because we want him in the Administration.”

  Staebler warned Shriver that McNamara would not take the job. He was, said Staebler, the most conscientious of men, and now was just taking over a system built specifically around him. It was not just a question of replacing one man with another.

  To Staebler, McNamara was different from the other auto executives. While the rest of the auto-making hierarchy was a solid Republican fortress, living in the same elegant suburbs, going to the same posh country clubs, McNamara was something of a maverick. He deliberately lived far from Detroit, in the groves of academe in Ann Arbor, his life style was different, and he had something of a sense of social responsibility. He supported Democrats from time to time, men like Senator Philip Hart and Congressman James O’Hara. He had not, rather vocally, supported Governor Soapy Williams, disliking Williams’ close ties to organized labor, and indeed there were those in Detroit who felt there was a surprising intensity to McNamara’s opposition to Williams, as though given a chance to vote Republican and be orthodox, he had seized it eagerly. He was liberal on most things, such as civil rights, but on labor, the great bugaboo in the auto industry, his views were surprisingly hard-line because labor kept interfering with his cost effectiveness and put constant pressure on the auto industry. McNamara and his Democratic friend Staebler used to argue regularly about labor’s productivity, about the fact that American labor costs were too high, and that we were losing our competitive edge. Bob was, after all, the statistician; even in the Air Force, labor’s role had been functional, not human, a factor rather than people.

  Staebler did find out that McNamara had voted for Kennedy, and meanwhile the Kennedy people began checking with their people out in Detroit, getting political clearance. The chief of their people was Jack Conway, one of Walter Reuther’s brightest aides, a United Automobile Workers political officer. To Conway, McNamara was by far the best of the breed. McNamara had never participated in the annual salary negotiations with labor (he was in a different department), but the two had worked closely in 1959 and 1960 during a major overhaul of the Michigan tax system when the Democratic party and labor were trying to bring in a state income tax. At the start, Ford and McNamara had both been strongly against the tax, but at the end of six months of committee work, McNamara changed his views and opposed the official Ford position, a switch which made him few friends in the auto hierarchy. He was, thought Conway, an impressive man to work with, the mind was first-rate, the intellectual discipline awesome, but more, you could engage him even when you disagreed, and you could even change his mind because his ego was not involved in his earlier stand. As for McNamara, he was finally impressed by the equity of the labor people’s position. Conway had left with a strong and favorable impression of McNamara as a broad-gauged man, and he would help clear him later that year. McNamara was similarly impressed with Conway, and when he accepted the Defense job he asked Kennedy if he could offer Conway a job as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower. But President of the AFL-CIO George Meany, no lover of Reuther, heard about it and blew up, blocking the job and creating a rift between himself and McNamara.

  He was called to Washington and met Kennedy, who immediately liked him and offered him either Treasury or Defense. The Treasury job had little attraction; he asked one member of the Kennedy team what the Secretary of the Treasury does, and was told that he sets the interest rates. “Hell, I do more at Ford about setting the interests than the Secretary of the Treasury,” he answered. He was bored with finances as an end in itself and felt more intrigued by Defense; one could serve more, contribute more, the challenge was greater. If one wanted a platform for national ser
vice, then Secretary of Defense under an activist President would be better than heading the Ford Motor Company. It was a better place to exercise power, to do more good, with greater visibility, particularly for someone who had always been somewhat uneasy in the automotive industry, his conscience never entirely at ease.

  Their first meeting went very well; the puritan in McNamara made him ask Kennedy if he had really written Profiles in Courage, and Kennedy assured him that he had. McNamara expressed doubts about his training for the job; Kennedy answered that he knew of no school for Presidents, either. He demanded of Kennedy, and received permission, to pick his own men (much to the frustration of Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who, having lent an honored name to the Kennedy cause by inveighing in West Virginia against Hubert Humphrey’s courage and patriotism, hoped to be Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt had tipped off reporters to where McNamara was staying in Washington, in hopes that as they questioned him they would find out about his own job. Thus the reporters trapped McNamara: “I hear you’re going to name Frank Roosevelt Secretary of the Navy?” “The hell I am,” McNamara answered. “But he’s the President’s friend,” the reporter persisted. “I told the President I would pick my own men, and I’m not picking him.” Perhaps not always his own men, since the job went to John Connally of Texas, a close friend of the Vice-President’s).

  Having accepted the job, McNamara went back to Detroit to get clearance from his boss, Henry Ford II, who, less than enthusiastic, let him go, for in giving the presidency to McNamara, a system and accounting man rather than a traditional auto man, he had based an entire production system around one highly specialized individual, and the functioning of that system was very much dependent on that one person. Now he was losing the man and keeping the system. In the meantime McNamara talked with past Defense Secretaries and other experts, and showed up a week later in Washington thoroughly prepared; in that short time he had mastered what the main issues before him were and singled out the major areas of work. He already seemed unique in his grasp of the situation, his control, discipline and energy. The Kennedy people, who were having the normal trouble trying to change from seeking office to assuming office, were impressed by the new Secretary, who seemed to be out and running while they were still in the standing start. He had developed that capacity at Ford, to prepare himself so thoroughly in the more intricate areas (his control of the most abstract figures was formidable) that other men, mere mortals, came away quickly impressed.

  He managed to pick an uncommon group of bright, fast, analytical, self-assured men who in part helped lead us into the war in Vietnam, but who, unlike other layers of the Washington bureaucracy, would turn and help lead the fight to extricate the country from the war. It was said that in the Kennedy-Johnson years, the three places with the most talented people were the White House under Bundy, the Justice Department under Robert Kennedy, and the Defense Department under McNamara.

  Even in the beginning he was completely sure of what he wanted to do, sure of the kind of people he wanted. While the talent scouts under Yarmolinsky were putting up different men, one of them had called Cyrus Vance at his New York law firm, because Vance was the kind of good, sound lawyer you put in a new Administration, and asked if he would like to be in the Defense Department. Vance said yes, as a matter of fact, he would. What kind of job, Cy? A service secretary job, I guess. What service? asked the talent scout. The Navy, I suppose. I was on a destroyer during the war—and so it was decided that Vance would be Secretary of the Navy. McNamara flipped through his dossier and said yes, this man has impressive credentials, but all my service secretaries have to have administrative ability of some kind, and this man doesn’t. So Vance was given the job of general counsel to the Defense Department. Everyone else in the Administration was still learning, but McNamara already seemed to know, already the confidence was there. From the very start, he was an active, decisive Secretary of Defense, and this was not lost on John Kennedy.

  Theirs was a relationship which was to continue with mutual admiration and ease, and McNamara was one of the few people working for Kennedy who crossed the great divide and became a part of his social world. Midway through the Kennedy Administration, in fact, a reporter working on a magazine article would ask McNamara who his friends were, and McNamara would answer, well, he had lots of friends. “But whom do you call when you want to relax and chew the fat or have a beer?” And McNamara answered, “The Kennedys—I like the Kennedys.” He had left Detroit, though, at an enormous financial sacrifice, perhaps a loss of as much as $3 million (he had somewhat less than $1 million to his name when he went to Washington). At the time, one block of stock options was about to mature in just a few weeks and Henry Ford graciously suggested he delay two weeks in selling, but that would have interfered with his swearing-in ceremony and McNamara played by the rules. Besides, he was always far more interested in power than money. Power to do good, of course, not power for power’s sake.

  His growing up had been simple—and enviable. Good parents. Good values. Good education. Good marks. He was born in San Francisco in 1916, the son of Robert J. McNamara and Claranell Strange (thus the middle name, Robert Strange McNamara, upon which his critics would so joyously seize in later years). His father, who married late, was fifty when Bob was born; he was a sales manager for a San Francisco wholesale shoe firm. Father Catholic, mother Protestant, McNamara a Protestant. (Later, during the height of Lyndon Johnson’s love affair with McNamara, the President thought of the Secretary of Defense as a vice-presidential possibility and called around to Democratic pols with the idea. “You could even see Lyndon thinking it out—the Protestants will assume he’s a Protestant, and the Catholics will think he’s a Catholic,” one White House aide said.)

  When he and his sister were small, the family moved across the Bay to an area of Oakland which featured a particularly good school system. They lived in Annerly, a nice middle-class section. More than forty years later his teachers would remember him with pleasure. Bob was always well behaved, never pushy, his work always ready in case you called on him; he prepared beautiful books on foreign countries—if only there had been more like him. On to Piedmont High, a school of high standing, where he received excellent marks. He was a doer, no jarred nerves, joining all the right clubs, honor societies, the yearbook, the glee club, president of a secret fraternity pledged to service. He was a very good student but not yet exceptional; an early IQ test put him above the norm, very bright but not exceptional.

  From Piedmont he went to Berkeley at a time when Robert Gordon Sproul was turning it into a great university (McNamara greatly admired Sproul, and some friends felt that one of his secret ambitions was to leave Ford, if not for government service, then to head Berkeley). At Berkeley he was remembered as a student with a broadly based education and interests. His proficiency in math was beginning to show through, and his own grades came so easily that he had time to read and work in other courses. His professors assumed that he would become a teacher; he did not seem to have the kind of drive, the hustle, which one felt went with a business career; he seemed a little more scholarly. Those were good years, summers spent gold mining (unsuccessfully), climbing mountains, a sport which he quickly came to love, learning to ski, which he went at in typical McNamara style: find out your weaknesses and work on them, and then keep working on them. Man could conquer all by discipline, and will, and rationality.

  From Berkeley he went to Harvard Business School, where he was an immediate standout. His unique ability in accounting control became evident, and he began to work at applying that talent to management techniques. He graduated, moved back to the Bay area to work for Price Waterhouse, and in 1939 started seeing an old friend named Margaret Craig. When he was asked back to Harvard Business to teach accounting, he married Marg (whom everyone would consider a good and humanizing influence on McNamara; much of what was good in Bob, friends thought, came from Marg’s generous instincts). At Harvard he was a particularly good teacher, well organized, wit
h good control of his subject and enthusiasm for his work, but he was restless. World War II was approaching and he wanted to play his part; the Navy had turned him down because of weak eyes. He was trying to join the Army when Harvard Business School went to war.

  Robert Lovett, the World War I aviator, had stayed in Europe after the Armistice. He had been plagued with a bad stomach, had lived far too much on baby foods, and thus had forsworn most of the social life that a well-connected young banker might be expected to enjoy. Instead he devoted himself to the political study of a decaying Europe and a military study of what the Hitler build-up would mean, particularly in the way of air power. He predicted accurately the fall of France, saw the rot in the fiber there, and sensed that it would be a war that no one could contain, in which air power, an embryonic factor in the first war, would become the decisive factor. He returned to America in 1940, and as a private citizen, while the rest of the country slept, he made his own private tour of all U.S. airplane factories and airfields to find out what America’s air needs and resources were, and he was shocked by the inadequacy of what he saw. He foresaw vast possibilities for American air power, given our industrial base; American industry could flex its muscle and build the greatest air force in the world, which would wreak massive saturation bombing against the enemy’s industrial might. He had met James Forrestal through banking connections, and Forrestal, then Undersecretary of the Navy, sent him to see Robert Patterson, Assistant Secretary of War, where Lovett quickly became a special assistant, then Assistant Secretary for Air, and where his own private planning saved the United States vital time. When this country finally entered the war, some progress had been made in spite of ourselves. But it had not been easy; Lovett could not even find out how many airplanes there were in the country. Charles (Tex) Thornton, one of Lovett’s aides, would remember that when they started in 1940, Lovett asked to see the Air Corps plan. There was much stalling, but Thornton insisted, the Air Corps plan, the overall plan for the defense of this country, and for its offense as well. The military kept delaying and delaying, and finally they brought down a plan for the aerial defense of New York City, with the dust still on it, apparently designed more to fight off the Red Baron than the new massive waves of air power being fielded in modern warfare.