The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The top managers and “leading experts” were on the war’s side. The war’s prosecution had been placed in their hands, and for understandable reasons. For two decades America’s bureaucratic and corporate experts had met every challenge they had been set, from a two-front war against Germany and Japan to the construction of an interstate highway system. Much as Johnson had revived Kennedy’s stalled civil rights initiatives and turned them into a massive constitutional reform, he took Kennedy’s inchoate plans to make a manly anti-communist stand somewhere in Southeast Asia (Laos had been the first country on which Kennedy’s whimsy landed) and turned them into a focused military campaign. President Kennedy had recruited Robert McNamara, the president of the Ford Motor Company, to be his secretary of defense. McNamara had won the esteem of the country’s leaders, and the authority to manage its now-nuclearized armed forces, on the strength of his corporate career. McNamara was not a sadistic military strategist, like William Tecumseh Sherman; he was a true believer in “systems management,” like, in a later era, Mark Zuckerberg. He took certain techniques useful for managing corporations and grievously misapplied them.