It is not easy being a puritan in Babylon, living the private life of a puritan but competing with the other Babylonians in the daytime pursuit of profit and growth, and the Ford McNamara was an immensely complicated man. He would have been a simple man had he stayed on in a university, taught there, lived there, sent his students out in the world a little better for their experience with him, but essentially one man, no difference between the theory and practice of McNamara. But this was different. He who had little material drive of his own was committed to making it in the world of profit and excess and, indeed, greed (to hold power he had to be, above all, a successful businessman, and his power stemmed from his ability to do the job, to cut corners, to make profits).
So the ferocious businessman of Detroit was the humane citizen of Ann Arbor: he read the right books, went to local art openings in Ann Arbor, and supported the local cultural affairs, which always needed supporting. Marg belonged, of course, to the local UN group, and Bob and Marg were both members of a book club, which met once a month. Each person picked a book for a meeting, then all of them read and discussed it (with no more than two drinks at the meetings). Bob’s book was Camus’ The Rebel. His intellectualism was even then a little self-conscious; it wasn’t so much that he was philosophical as he liked to be philosophical, he liked to improve himself (he was the final self-improvement man; he read an essay because it was an essay to be read), the man with the five-foot shelf of Great Books. Later, when he arrived in Washington, all that intelligence and force made some of the capital’s more skeptical residents feel that there was a gee-whiz quality to his intellectual pursuits, McNamara a little self-conscious about intellectual pursuits, a part of the Great Book crowd . . . Bob and Marg to be improved . . . he had just talked to Barbara Ward and she said this and that. At the Robert Kennedy’s Hickory Hill seminars, which were a symbolic feature of the vastly overrated New Frontier culture, more chic than substance, the women had to be either very pretty, or Mrs. Longworth, McNamara was a constant and deadly earnest student. He took the seminars more seriously than anyone else, always doing his homework, always asking a serious question.
As there was later in Washington, there was something of a split in the personality during the Detroit years, a switchover after 6:30 p.m. There was the driving, relentless, cost-effective executive of Ford during the day and the resident philosopher of Ann Arbor in the evening, one cold and efficient, the other warm, almost gregarious. It was as if he compartmentalized his mind; the deep philosophic thoughts were important, but they were not to be part of the broader outlook; if perhaps he were to stand for some of the good things in business he would do it after he took control of Ford. Subvert them first and then announce who you are. If later the immensity of the contradictions between his liberal instincts and the war in Vietnam would cause him grief, similarly the difference between his sense of social conscience and the enormous needs of great industry caused him problems earlier. It was as if the contradictions of our age were all within him. At Ford he could be an advocate of consumer rights, hating the way the parts system worked, with dealers forcing spare parts on customers (the dealers, of course, loved this because they could charge high labor rates for repairs). Although McNamara despised this system, he was also very much a part of it, because it was, yes, cost-effective, very lucrative, and the dealers in those years did not get the choice items from Detroit unless they sold the requisite number of parts to their customers. (Years later at the Pentagon he would be a symbol of an attempt to control the arms race and at the same time one of the world’s great arms salesmen to other countries because it cut Pentagon costs, was good for the budget, looked good on the Hill, made the President smile.)
McNamara believed in car safety and thought it was important, yet he never really pushed it until 1956 when Ford was flat beaten by Chevy; Ford was in the last year of a three-year cycle and Chevy had a hot new car, a sharp new style, a V-8 engine, and Ford was dead and they all knew it. Since the Ford people realized that there was little in the way of options, they decided to sell safety; it was not often, one of them said, that you got to be on the side of both God and profits. It was McNamara’s idea and decision. He had long been concerned about safety and wanted to bring it in; yet it was also a last-minute decision and a desperate one. They added some safety latches, a deep-dish steering wheel, crash padding in front, and called in J. Walter Thompson to do the campaign. The theme was that Ford was safe and safety was good for you, something that sounds mild to the uninitiated but which was revolutionary at the time. When the cars came out, Chevy was, predictably, a great success; the Ford was a bust and McNamara’s job even seemed to be on the line.
Then he caught the flu and went to Florida for a rest. While he was gone some of the General Motors executives and some of their old friends at Ford tried a coup against McNamara. Apparently high GM officials called Henry and said—look, this is serious, you’re ruining the auto industry, you’re selling death, the image you’re projecting is violent and ugly (cars, after all, were for pleasure and brought happiness. On the television commercials, handsome young men drove new cars and they met good-looking young women). With Henry’s sanction a group of the old GM people took over some of McNamara’s functions. It was, in effect, a takeover; he was, in fact, close to being out. But he rose from the ashes, saved not so much by the generosity of Henry Ford, or the Ford power structure, as by the 1957 Ford and by the much despised dealers, who knew they had a hot car (this was one of the two years while he was at Ford that Ford beat Chevrolet) and were willing to stay with the ’56 in order to get the ’57. So Ford decided to cut back on the ’56 and minimize its losses. The new advertising was changed to style, performance, and yes—you could barely hear it—safety. It was not untypical of McNamara at Ford, and later at Defense, that he started with good intentions, touched with a certain expediency and a little dissembling, and ended up not with a success, but with something even worse, for it became part of the auto mythology that safety does not sell, safety is bad and hurts business. It would take another decade and an outsider named Ralph Nader who did not worry about hiding his intentions or making it in the business world, to put the full moral pressure on the auto industry to bring some safety and consumer reforms.
When McNamara went to Washington, most of his friends in Ann Arbor felt that he left with a sigh of relief, that he had never really liked the auto industry, never found enough fulfillment (they thought also that Marg had always felt that selling cars was a little unbecoming, a little unsavory). It was as if, once he had found that he could make it at Ford and win, he was bored with the world, with the other men who could talk only about cars. It was as if, presented a challenge, he had mastered it in order to give himself credibility and respectability in the world of business (thus, if you were a success in the business world, met payrolls, made profits, you were a serious person, and your social and other opinions took on a more serious nature; you were not a simple do-gooder who has never lived in the real world). He made money for Henry not because he was interested in profits but because his power was based on his relationship with Henry, and Henry had charged him with this, thus it was his responsibility to make profits. (In 1955 he was asked to give the commencement address at the University of Alabama, and he wrote a speech which said finally that there had to be a higher calling for a businessman than simply making money. One of the Ford officials saw the advance text and insisted that the passage come out; McNamara was very bitter and thought of canceling the speech. “Damn it,” he told friends. “I’m making more money for them than they’ve ever had made before. Why can’t they leave me alone?” But friends told him that the Ford people had not said he couldn’t say this, they had simply refused to permit it in the advance text. So he went down to the commencement and when he got to the controversial passage in his speech, he shouted it out so that it could be heard all the way back to Detroit.)
When he was offered the Defense job, his close friends felt they would no
t really be surprised if he accepted; he had, they thought, been looking for a larger and more satisfying stage. The only thing which would make him stay would be a sense of responsibility to Henry, certainly not to himself. There were people at Ford who were pleased, feeling as they did that the company under this coldly driving, efficient man had been too stifled. In Ann Arbor the pleasant liberals in his book club were pleased too, to see this humane man that they admired so much take on such an important new job as Defense. One of them, Robert Angell, the head of the sociology department and a member of McNamara’s book club, who had admired the breadth of McNamara’s mind, went to his classes that morning and instead of beginning with the regularly scheduled work, he talked movingly about McNamara, how lucky the country was to have this kind of man in such a difficult job, a man who was far more than a businessman, a real philosopher with a conscience and a human sensitivity. Later, when the Bay of Pigs happened, Angell and the others would receive something of a shock—how could Bob be involved in something like this? Angell, a very gentle man, decided, talking with some of Bob’s other friends, that they had made Bob go along. And then McNamara went to Vietnam and came back, and Angell turned on his television set and there was Bob talking about putting people in fortified villages, and Angell wondered what had happened to Bob, he sounded so different. And his friends in Ann Arbor would watch him with his pointer as he crisply explained where the bombs were falling. In 1965 Angell would duly set off for the first teach-in against the war, held at Michigan, and he and the other friends would always wonder what had happened to Bob; they heard that Marg had been sick, that the war had torn Bob up, but they would not talk about it with him because Bob did not come back to visit them.
Chapter Thirteen
McNamara had come in at a dead run; by the time he was sworn in he had already identified the hundred problems of the Defense Department, had groups and committees studying them. He had his people plucked from the campuses or the shadow government of the Rand Corporation and other think tanks. They were cool and lucid, these men, men of mathematical precision who had grown up in the atmosphere of the Cold War, and who were students of nuclear power and parity and deployment, men whose very professions sometimes sounded uncivilized to the humanist. He took over the Defense Department for a Chief Executive who had run on the promise of getting America moving again (one pictured them always without overcoats and hats, moving and pushing quickly through crowds, always on the move; Kennedy had once gotten angry at Robert Bird, a reporter for the Herald Tribune, because Bird had written that the reason that this dynamic young man was able to campaign without an overcoat in the cold of New Hampshire and Wisconsin was that he wore thermal underwear), on the assumption that we were losing our power and manhood, they had more missiles. McNamara had assumed that his first job when he took over would be to hurry up production and close the missile gap, but he soon discovered that there was none. Shortly after the election McNamara told Pentagon reporters this, a statement which caused a considerable flap, particularly among Republicans, who had lost an election partly because of a nonexistent gap. How many God-fearing, Russian-fearing citizens had cast their votes to end the gap and live a more secure life, only to find that they had been safe all along. When Kennedy called McNamara the next day to find out what had happened, McNamara denied that he had ended the missile gap, a denial which made the Pentagon reporters, who had heard the statement with their own ears, very leary of his word in the future.
But it was true, there was no missile gap, so instead of increasing the might of the United States and catching up with the Russians, McNamara set out to harness the might, to control it and to bring some order and rationality to it, and soon, above all, to limit the use of nuclear weapons. To control the weapons, to limit them, to rationalize their procedures absorbed his time and his energy; and Vietnam, which was a tiny little storm cloud on the horizon, seemed distant, small, manageable, far from the real center of man’s question of survival or self-destruction. It would be one of the smaller ironies of his years as Secretary of Defense that in making his arguments against nuclear weapons, forcefully, relentlessly, he had to make counterarguments for conventional forces, to build up those conventional forces. We had to have some kind of armed might, so he made good and effective arguments for conventional weapons (and if the Chiefs wanted to use them in Vietnam, to send American combat troops without nuclear weapons, he had to go along, since he had developed the thesis, the mystique of what conventional weapons could do with the new mobility). He gave them a rationale, for his overriding concern was quickly to limit the possibilities of nuclear war, to gain control of those weapons.
It was a very different time, the immediate post-Eisenhower years. The Chiefs, who were held over from the previous Administration (generals who believed in a more balanced posture, like Ridgway and Taylor, had been either winnowed out, or more or less ignored), were men who believed that nuclear war was a viable kind of military position; indeed, the entire American military posture was essentially based on a willingness to use nuclear weapons. That was an eerie-enough thought, and some people wanted to crawl away from it. Men such as Henry Kissinger, then of Harvard, had just made himself something of an intellectual reputation as a theoretician of tactical nuclear weapons (that is, finding something respectable between blowing up the world and being too soft), and there was thus something of a fad for tactical nuclear weapons. (Though one problem was that in the Pentagon’s war games there always seemed to be a problem with the tactical nuclear weapons. No matter which side fired first, the other side would retaliate, and every time without fail it would somehow expand to strategic weapons; whoever was behind on the little stuff would let fly with the big stuff.)
Daniel Ellsberg discussed the subject of nuclear weapons with McNamara during a luncheon meeting; later he would remember the Secretary’s passion on the subject. He was against using tactical weapons (“They’re the same thing, there’s no difference,” he said, “once you use them, you use everything else. You can’t keep them limited. You’ll destroy Europe, everything”). Ellsberg had heard that McNamara was a man without convictions or emotions, but decided that this was a deliberately chosen pose, and an effective one, to cover real feelings. It was, he thought, an impressive performance, not just because of McNamara’s almost emotional abhorrence of the weapons but because he understood the dangers of his situation: he had to keep his feelings hidden, for if the Chiefs or Congress found out how he felt he would be finished as Secretary of Defense. The whole might of America was concentrated on nuclear weapons, and we had sold the idea of nuclear retaliation to the Europeans; if the word got out of the Secretary’s negative attitude, it would mean that the United States was virtually disarmed, so of course he would not be able to stay in office.
Shortly after lunch Ellsberg received a call from Adam Yarmolinsky, who had been present during the meeting. “You must not speak of this lunch to anyone. It is of the highest importance. Not to anyone. It must not get around.” Ellsberg agreed, and then mentioned a rumor that the President himself felt the same way about the weapons. (There was a story going around hip Pentagon circles that Kennedy was unreliable, almost soft on nukes; he had been taken to visit a SAC base, and when he saw a 20-megaton bomb, he blanched visibly. “Why do we need one of these?” he asked. It caused a scandal in SAC circles because this, of course, was the standard bomb, they were all like this.) “There is no difference between them at all,” Yarmolinsky answered.
McNamara worked hard to change Western thinking about nuclear policy. He set out to educate not just the Pentagon but his European colleagues as well, forming the Nuclear Planning Group for his European counterparts, men who were politicians first, not managers, and thus felt themselves particularly dependent on their generals. He forced them to build a table where only the defense ministers could sit. No prepared papers or set speeches were allowed, and they could not turn to their generals who then turned to their colonels. They came to the meetings,
only one person from each country at the table, only four others allowed in the room, he hated crowds. At first it did not work too well because McNamara overwhelmed them, he was too strong a presence, but gradually he forced them to take political responsibility for defense positions, and equally important, build skilled professional staffs which could challenge the technical thinking of the military at the lower levels, point by point, so they would not be forced into blind choices at the highest level.
The Best and the Brightest Page 38
