The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  That McNamara had such a good reputation in Washington was not entirely incidental—he knew about the importance of public relations, and played that game with surprising skill. Finding that his top public relations man at Defense, Arthur Sylvester, was a man of limited sophistication and ability, McNamara quickly learned how to use him to stand as a lightning rod and filter between the Secretary and the average working reporter, essentially to fend the press off and deflect the heat (leaving many reporters to wonder why a man as able as McNamara had a press aide as inept as Sylvester; the answer was that it was deliberate). At the same time he used Adam Yarmolinsky, a former Harvard Law School professor and a man with unusually good connections with the liberal establishment, to do the more serious job of protecting the Secretary’s image with major writers and columnists, and it was Yarmolinsky who would write the letters to the editor tidying up McNamara’s reputation after various critical articles.

  If the body was tense and driven, the mind was mathematical, analytical, bringing order and reason out of chaos. Always reason. And reason supported by facts, by statistics—he could prove his rationality with facts, intimidate others. He was marvelous with charts and statistics. Once, sitting at CINCPAC for eight hours watching hundreds and hundreds of slides flashed across the screen showing what was in the pipe line to Vietnam and what was already there, he finally said, after seven hours, “Stop the projector. This slide, number 869, contradicts slide 11.” Slide 11 was flashed back and he was right, they did contradict each other. Everyone was impressed, and many a little frightened. No wonder his reputation grew; others were in awe. For it was a mind that could continue to summon its own mathematical kind of sanity into bureaucratic battle, long after the others, the good liberal social scientists who had never gone beyond their original logarithms, had trailed off into the dust, though finally, when the mathematical version of sanity did not work out, when it turned out that the computer had not fed back the right answers and had underestimated those funny little far-off men in their raggedy pajamas, he would be stricken with a profound sense of failure, and he would be, at least briefly, a shattered man. But that would come later. At his height he always seemed in control; you could, said Lyndon Johnson, who once admired him and trotted him out on so many occasions, almost hear the computers clicking away. But when things went sour and Johnson felt McNamara’s doubts, his tongue, always acid for those who failed him, did not spare his prize pupil. He would say to those around him, “I forgot he had only been president of Ford for one week.” Yet even then, when his tenure as Secretary of Defense was coming to an end and he knew that his policy had failed, even then his faith in his kind of rationality did not really desert him. The war was a human waste, yes, but it was also no longer cost-effective; we were putting in more for our air power than we were getting back in damage, ten dollars of input for one dollar of damage, and the one dollar was being put up by the Soviet Union and not North Vietnam, anyway.

  He was an emotional man as well, weeping at his last Pentagon ceremony, his friends at the very end worried about his health, both mental and physical, about what the war had done to his ethical framework. The Kennedy people in particular worried about him. He was a close friend of the Kennedys’, gay and gregarious at dinner parties. Though not noted for his wit—no one had ever accused him of an overdeveloped sense of irony, which after all was to be found mostly in peoples and nations that history had defeated, and Bob was undefeated. He had a certain gaiety and ingratiating charm, an ability to talk about things other than shop. “Why is it,” asked Bob Kennedy, “that they all call him 'the computer’ and yet he’s the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?” That loyalty to the Kennedy family, which had begun in 1961, endured through tragedy after tragedy. “Bob,” Ethel said to him after Chappaquiddick, “get up here, there’s no one here but women.”

  It would not be surprising that in the latter part of the sixties, when a sense of disillusion with Camelot grew, that the Kennedy insiders in particular wanted to spare McNamara. They were by then quite willing to write off the war and the men who made it. Mac Bundy evoked no fondness, to say the least. He had given grants to Robert Kennedy’s staff after the 1968 assassination, but there were still bitter feelings about his serving as a conduit for Johnson during the vice-presidential squabble of 1964. And Johnson was no favorite, the Kennedys had never been generous to him, nothing he did would ever please them. Max Taylor had been a favorite and there was some personal loyalty still there, but Taylor’s strict adherence to the war, right through 1968, made it difficult to salvage him. With Bob McNamara it was different, he could still go out and play house games at Hickory Hill and they wanted to spare him from the responsibility; if McNamara had been in on the planning of the big escalation in 1965, and they doubted even that, then Lyndon had somehow pushed him into it. Bob, they thought, was always a little too eager to please (though at the time these events were taking place, George Ball would grow tired of having to repeat to his liberal friends that McNamara was fooling them; he might sound dovish around Washington liberals but he was rough as hell inside those meetings, and in 1965 he was always on the other side).

  Bob McNamara was a remarkable man in a remarkable era; if at the beginning he seemed to embody many if not most of the era’s virtues, at the end of it he seemed to embody its pathos, flaws and tragedy. No one could doubt his good intentions, his ability, his almost ferocious sense of public service, yet something about him bothered many of his colleagues. It was not just Vietnam, but his overall style. It was what made him so effective: the total belief in what he was doing, the willingness to knock down anything that stood in his way, the relentless quality, so that other men, sometimes wiser, more restrained, would be pushed aside. He would, for instance, lie, dissemble, not just to the public, they all did that in varying degrees, but inside, in high-level meetings, always for the good of the cause, always for the right reason, always to serve the Office of the President. Bob knew what was good for the cause, but sometimes at the expense of his colleagues. And indeed, experienced McNamara watchers, men who were fond of him, would swear they knew when Bob was lying; his voice would get higher, he would speak faster, he would become more insistent.

  He embodied the virtues Americans have always respected, hard work, self-sacrifice, decency, loyalty. Loyalty, that was it, perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself. He was, finally, the embodiment of the liberal contradictions of that era, the conflict between the good intentions and the desire to hold and use power (most of what was good in us and what was bad in us was there; the Jeffersonian democracy become a superpower). It was always there inside his body, Bob conniving and dissembling to do good and to hold power at the same time. Later, near the end of his tour, he went to Harvard, where in another and gentler time he might have been revered, but where now he was almost captured by the radical students, a narrow escape. That night, when he was speaking to a group of professors, someone asked him about the two McNamaras, the quantifier who had given us the body count in Vietnam, and the warm philosopher of the Montreal speech, a humanistic speech which seemed to cast doubt on the nation’s—his own—defense policies. (When Johnson heard of the speech he flew into a rage, demanding to know who at the White House had cleared it, and when it turned out that it was Bill Moyers, this would speed Moyers’ own departure.) He answered: “I gave the Montreal speech because I could not survive in office without giving it, could not survive with my own conscience, and it gave me another ten months, but the price I paid for it is so high in the Congress and the White House, people who have assumed I was a peacenik all along, that if I had to do it over again, I would not give that speech.”

  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 Defens
e 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 service, 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 ent
irely 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).