At this point the Council began meeting with McNamara and pushing him hard to get a more exact estimate of the cost, and also to get him to push for a tax increase. But they found McNamara, usually so sure, usually so filled with certitudes, very reluctant to come down with a hard figure for the cost of the war, and he gave three figures: high, low and medium. The high was $17 billion (or $7 billion over the original estimate), the medium was $15 billion, the low was $11 billion. Eventually the figure came to $21 billion, which meant that even his own medium private re-estimate for the
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