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April 8 - June 26, 2018
In place of the formal Eisenhower system, Kennedy relied on an ad hoc, collegial style of decision making in national security and foreign affairs. He formed task forces to analyze particular problems and met irregularly with an “inner club” of his most trusted advisers to discuss problems informally and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of potential courses
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Under the Kennedy-Johnson system, the Joint Chiefs lost the direct access to the president, and thus the real influence on decision making, that the Eisenhower
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Kennedy and the young New Frontiersmen of his administration viewed the Eisenhower JCS with suspicion.
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Taylor thought that Eisenhower was obsessed with “loyalty and teamplay,”
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His misrepresentation of his war experience for political benefit revealed a real propensity for lying. Both Lyndon Johnson’s self-doubt and his willingness to forgo the truth would color his relationship with his principal military advisers and shape the way that the United States became more deeply involved in the Vietnam War.
McNamara would dominate the policy-making process because of three mutually reinforcing factors: the Chiefs’ ineffectiveness as an advisory group, Johnson’s profound insecurity, and the president’s related unwillingness to entertain divergent views on the subject of Vietnam.
In McNamara’s concept of “graduated pressure,” the aim of force was not to impose one’s will on the enemy but to communicate with him. Gradually intensifying military action would convey American resolve and thereby convince an adversary to alter his behavior.
He who permits himself to tell a lie often finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, til at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions. –THOMAS JEFFERSON, 17852
