The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

Taylor acknowledged that the risks of backing into a major Asian war were present but (in words that would live longer than he might have wanted) “not impressive.” North Vietnam “is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing, a weakness which should be exploited diplomatically in convincing Hanoi to lay off South Vietnam” (a vulnerability which, if it existed, Hanoi was less aware of than both Taylor and Rostow). Both Hanoi and Peking, he cabled, faced “severe logistical difficulties in trying to maintain strong forces in the field in Southeast Asia, difficulties which we share, but by no means to the same degree.”

As for the key question of how American troops would fare, Taylor found South Vietnam “not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate.” In perhaps the most significant passage of all, he thought it was comparable to Korea, “where U.S. troops learned to live and work without too much effort.

This part of the Taylor cables is perhaps the most revealing insight into the way the American military—even the best of the American military—regarded Vietnam and the war. This was the time when unconventional warfare was a great fad in Washington, and here was Taylor, who was supposed to be an expert on it, making a comparison with Korea: we had the same problems there, and we overcame them. In searching for the parallel war, Taylor singled out Korea but mentioned only the comparable quality of the terrain (actually, Korea is far more open and has, from a military point of view, a much easier terrain, where tanks and air power can be used to great advantage), without considering the crucial difference between Korea and Vietnam: the very nature of the war. The former was a conventional war with a traditional border crossing by a uniformed enemy massing his troops; the latter was a political war conducted by guerrillas and feeding on subversion. There was no uniformed, massed enemy to use power against; the enemy was first and foremost political, which meant that the support of the population made the guerrillas’ way possible. The very presence of Caucasian troops was likely to turn quickly into a political disadvantage, more than canceling out any military benefits. There was a parallel war: the French Indochina war or the Philippine insurrection. But Taylor made the comparison with Korea, and if this general, who was so widely respected, a man who was an intellectual and...

All in all, the Taylor-Rostow report is an extraordinary document and provides a great insight into the era. It shows a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the war (there was no discussion of the serious political problems of the war in Taylor’s cables). It was arrogant and contemptuous toward a foe who had a distinguished and impressive record against a previous Western challenger. It was written by a general who had seen the limits of air power in Korea and now said that if things went wrong, air power would handle Hanoi any time we wanted. It assumed that the people and the government of South Vietnam were the same thing; yet it also said that a people allegedly fighting for their survival, already overstocked with American aid and material, needed reassurance, that the problem was not one of political origin, but of confidence. When Ridgway in 1954 investigated the possibility of U.S. troops in Indochina, he maximized the risks and minimized the benefits; now Taylor was maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks.

The suggestion to use combat troops in Vietnam disturbed him. He had worked closely with the French during the Indochina war, and he had seen it all, the false optimism of the generals, the resiliency and relentlessness of the Vietminh, their capacity to exploit nationalism and to mire down a Western nation, the poisonous domestic effect. He wanted no part of it for America. When he read the Taylor cables calling for a small, oh so small, commitment, 8,000 men only, he immediately told Bundy and McNamara that if they went ahead with the Taylor proposals, the commitment would not stay small. They would have 300,000 men in there within five years (he was slightly off; it was 500,000 men in five-plus years) because sending combat troops would change the nature of the commitment and the nature of the war, and the other side would not let us out easily. Besides, this was exactly what Diem wanted; it would stabilize his regime and we would do his fighting for him. Both Bundy and McNamara argued with Ball; they believed in the capacity of rational men to control irrational commitments, and in the end they decided that even at 300,000, a troop commitment was worth a try. Then, Ball said, they must tell the President that it was worth that much blood and resources, and Bundy and McNamara agreed. When Ball himself made exactly the same point to Kennedy—that he would have 300,000 men there in a few short years—the President laughed and said, “George, you’re crazier than hell.”

This emphasis on reform and liberalization of the South Vietnamese society was in sharp contrast to the Taylor cables, which were primarily military in their view of the problem, but this was not surprising; it was somehow natural for a liberal, anti-Communist Administration to see the world through the prism of its own attitudes, and it was comforting to think in terms of reform, that liberalism and governmental change implanted from the top (the Vietcong were implementing change from the bottom up) could revive a sick society.

For many reasons the Taylor-Rostow report was far more decisive than anyone realized, not because Kennedy did what they recommended, but because in doing less than it called for, he felt he was being moderate, cautious. There was an illusion that he had held the line, whereas in reality he was steering us far deeper into the quagmire. He had not withdrawn when a contingent of 600 men there had failed, and now he was escalating that commitment to 15,000, which meant that any future decision on withdrawal would be that much more difficult. And he was escalating not just the troop figure but changing a far more subtle thing as well. Whereas there had been a relatively low level of verbal commitment—speeches, press conferences, slogans, fine words—his Administration would now have to escalate the rhetoric considerably to justify the increased aid, and by the same token, he was guaranteeing that an even greater anti-Communist public relations campaign would be needed in Vietnam to justify the greater commitment. He was expanding the cycle of American interest and involvement in ways he did not know.

While the President had the illusion that he had held off the military, the reality was that he had let them in. They now began to dominate the official reporting, so that the dispatches which came into Washington were colored through their eyes. Now they were players, men who had a seat at the poker table; they would now, on any potential dovish move, have to be dealt with. He had activated them, and yet at the same time had given them so precious little that they could always tell their friends that they had never been allowed to do what they really wanted. Dealing with the military, once their foot was in the door, both Kennedy and Johnson would learn, was an awesome thing. The failure of their estimates along the way, point by point, meant nothing. It did not follow, as one might expect, that their credibility was diminished and that there was now less pressure from them, but the reverse. It meant that there would be an inexorable pressure for more—more men, more hardware, more targets—and that with the military, short of nuclear weapons, the due bills went only one way, civilian to military. Thus one of the lessons for civilians who thought they could run small wars with great control was that to harness the military, you had to harness them completely; that once in, even partially, everything began to work in their favor. Once activated, even in a small way at first, they would soon dominate the play. Their particular power with the Hill and with hawkish journalists,...

At first, when Kennedy took office, the pressure had come only from Diem; then, because of his policy to reassure Diem and make him the instrument of our policy, Kennedy had sent over Fritz Nolting, who would soon seem to many to be more Diem’s envoy to the United States than vice versa. Now, by appointing Lieutenant General Paul D. Harkins to a new command, Kennedy was sending one more potential player against him, a figure who would represent the primacy of Saigon and the war, as opposed to the primacy of the Kennedy Administration, thus one more major bureaucratic player who might not respond to the same pressures that Kennedy was responding to, thereby feeding a separate and potentially hostile bureaucratic organism. Harkins began by corrupting the intelligence reports coming in. Up until 1961 they had been reasonably accurate, clear, unclouded by bureaucratic ambition; they had reflected the ambivalence of the American commitment to Diem, and the Diem flaws had been apparent both in CIA and, to a slightly lesser degree, in State reporting. Nolting would change State’s reporting, and to that would now be added the military reporting, forceful, detailed and highly erroneous, representing the new commander’s belief that his orders were to make sure things looked well on the surface. In turn the Kennedy Administration would waste precious energies debating whether or not the war was being won, wasting time trying to determine the factual basis on which the decisions were ...

Harkins would head the new U.S. command in Saigon, the command which was to be different and unconventional. No one, of course, could have been more conventional than Harkins. He knew nothing about guerrilla warfare, in fact he knew remarkably little about basic infantry tactics (if you knew something about small-unit infantry tactics you could at least learn about the war, because you could put yourself in the infantryman’s place). He was a cavalry man in the old days, a great polo player, a dashing social figure in the old Army, and then a tanker, a staffman at that. His career was distinguished because he was, in Army terms, diplomatic. He had been a staff officer for George Patton, and softened some of Patton’s verbal blows. He was considered very good on logistical planning. Harkins was, in addition to being a protégé of Patton’s, a trusted friend of Taylor’s. They had known each other well from the days at West Point and had kept in touch. When Max Taylor was Superintendent of the Point, it was not surprising that Paul Harkins turned up as Commandant of Cadets, and later when Max Taylor had the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, it was not surprising that Paul Harkins was his chief of staff. Others in the Army and in the bureaucracy were pushing for an officer with a sense of unconventional warfare, like Major General William Yarborough, then heading the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, or Colonel Ray Peers, who had served with the OSS during the war. But Taylor did not...

Back in China, Stilwell wanted above all to be well informed, to know his own men’s and the enemy’s capabilities, and he knew that anything less than the blunt truth and blunt intelligence about the enemy might cost him lives, his boys. So he not only debriefed his own military people carefully, but plucked from the embassy staff in Chungking the brightest young political officers, like John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service and Raymond Ludden, because he wanted the best. It did not matter whether the news was good or bad; the worse the news, the more you needed it. If things were going well you did not need a good intelligence system quite as much, events took care of themselves.

The American military command thought this was like any other war: you searched out the enemy, fixed him, killed him and went home. The only measure of the war the Americans were interested in was quantitative; and quantitatively, given the immense American fire power, helicopters, fighter-bombers and artillery pieces, it went very well. That the body count might be a misleading indicator did not penetrate the command; large stacks of dead Vietcong were taken as signs of success. That the French statistics had also been very good right up until 1954, when they gave up, made no impression. The French had lost the war because of a lack of will (the French were known for that) and a lack of fire power; Americans lacked neither will nor fire power. At an early intergovernmental meeting on the importance of psychological warfare, one of Harkins’ key staffmen, Brigadier General Gerald Kelleher, quickly dismissed that theory. His job, he said, was to kill Vietcong. But the French, responded a political officer named Douglas Pike, had killed a lot of Vietcong and they had not won. “Didn’t kill enough Vietcong,” answered Kelleher. Such was the attitude of the American headquarters; despite all the faddishness of counterinsurgency it was all very conventional, with a dominating belief that more and more force was what was really needed. Besides, it was not a serious war or a serious enemy; as the French generals had been overconfident because the enemy did not register in terms they...

Harriman wanted, above all, men who spoke freely and who did not automatically produce the existing mythology of the recent past. He drove those around him relentlessly, he did his homework (when he heard that Whiting’s book on China crossing the Yalu was good, he did not ask some young officer to brief him on it; he read it himself and then summoned Whiting to spend an entire Sunday going over it).

Since there was only one place to learn about rowing in those days, England, Harriman went there for two months at his own expense to study Oxford rowing; after his return to Yale, the crews there showed marked improvement. It was a typical Harriman act, both in professional and in personal life: whatever it is you’re interested in, find the source and learn all you can, let nothing stand in your way. At a late date he decided he wanted to learn bowling, thereupon built two bowling lanes in his home and practiced until he became quite proficient; similarly, wanting to learn about croquet, he read every book on the subject, studied the game, and when he played he took as much as twenty minutes to play a stroke, thus infuriating and upsetting opponents.

Within weeks of Harriman’s taking over at FE, some of his people were questioning the reporting and the optimism from Saigon. But it is crucial in retrospect to see the limits of the challenge. Then and in the months to follow, Harriman and his aides assaulted the accuracy of the military reports, of Nolting’s cables and of Diem’s viability, but they did not challenge the issue of dominoes upon which the commitment to South Vietnam was based, nor the broader role of America in the world. They were, in effect, asking the smaller questions in lieu of the larger ones. No one, least of all the President, wanted that kind of problem aired now. So it was a challenge within the limited pragmatism of the period: not whether we should be there or not, but whether we were winning, whether Diem, not South Vietnam, was viable. Harriman himself was still very much the anti-Communist in the broader sense, and he was an enthusiastic member of the counterinsurgency group (years later when a friend of his mildly mocked the faddishness and foolishness of the counterinsurgency period, he became very offended. Why, he answered, we did all kinds of good things throughout Latin America . . .). He was in effect challenging the absurdity of the surface, not the absurdity of the root. His job was to modernize the Dulles policies in Asia, but he and his aides were more disadvantaged in that job than they might have been a few months earlier, because the Kennedy Administration had just taken the ver...

Had there been some high Washington officials who had gone through the China experience and survived the aftermath, they would immediately have recognized it: the collapse of a feudal army confronted by a modern guerrilla army, with a high-level foreign general trying to cover up. But people in the Administration either did not know what had happened in China, or in a few cases, they knew but desperately wanted to avoid a repetition of it. What was happening was identifiable, except that no one was in any rush to identify it.

Of these men it was Vann, the most intense and dedicated of them, who came to symbolize the struggle against Harkins and his superior, General Taylor. By the time Vann went home in June 1963, he was the most informed American in the country. A statistician by training, he had managed to come up with a new kind of statistic. In contrast to the MACV, whose figures reflected only the greater American fire power and the American willingness to accept inflated ARVN body counts at face value, Vann had managed to compile a different kind of statistical story. Thus he documented the ARVN failure to fight (of the 1,400 government deaths in his sector in one year, only 50 were ARVN). This did not mean that the ARVN was fighting well, as Harkins implied; it confirmed that they were not fighting at all, and that the burden of the war was being borne by ill-equipped local militia who more often than not (Vann proved this too) were being killed asleep in their defensive positions. He was able to prove that commanders got troops from Diem not on the basis of Vietcong pressure, but on the basis of personal ties and their ability to protect Diem against a coup.

Vann began to get higher and higher hearings in the Pentagon until finally General Barksdale Hamlett, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, heard the briefing, was impressed and arranged for Vann to meet with the Joint Chiefs. Vann was warned by several high officers that above all he must not appear to be critical of General Harkins, who was the personal choice of Maxwell Taylor (by this time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), since Taylor seemed to be particularly sensitive and protective of Harkins and his reporting. He was also warned not to show his briefing until the last minute to General Krulak, who was the Secretary of Defense’s special adviser on guerrilla warfare, and a person who was already surfacing as a man with a vested interest in the optimism, having just returned from a tour of Saigon and reported to the Chiefs that the war was going very well, every bit as well as Harkins said. The Vann briefing was set for 2 p.m. on July 8, 1963. At 9:45 he sent a copy to General Krulak’s office. A little later Vann, eager, starched, finally getting his hearing, showed up outside the office of General Earle G. Wheeler, the Chief of Staff, to be on hand in case there were any new developments. He was sitting there when a phone call came in to one of Wheeler’s aides. “Who wants the item removed from the agenda?” the aide asked. The voice at the other end spoke for a few minutes. “Is this the Secretary of Defense’s or the Chairman’s office?” There was more talk. “Is that an ...

This charade was a microcosm of the way the high-level military destroyed dissenters, day after day in countless little ways, slanting the reporting lest the top level lose its antiseptic views, lest any germs of doubt reach the high level. It confirmed to many in the Pentagon that a good deal of the reason for the Harkins optimism and its harshness on doubters was not just Harkins’ doing. Rather, Harkins was a puppet controlled by Taylor and reflected Taylor’s decision that this should be the key to back-channel messages and the unofficial “word” which is so important in the Army, that the unofficial word for Harkins was coming from Taylor, and that the messenger between them was General Krulak.

Since mid-1962 the American military had been turning to the handful of American journalists in Saigon, using them as an outlet for their complaints. It was not particularly deliberate; but it was also impossible to keep their skepticism hidden. The journalists kept showing up in the countryside, and it was only a matter of time before they saw how hollow the entire operation was, how many lies were being told, and how fraudulent the war was. It was only a matter of time before a version of the war and of the regime, far more pessimistic, began to surface in the American press. Both Washington and Saigon immediately chose to see this as a press controversy; in reality it was a reflection of a major bureaucratic struggle and of a dying policy. But since the policy now depended for its life on the public relations aspect, on the Administration’s attempt to sell a frail and failed policy both to itself and to Diem, the reporters became targets of the Administration, both at home and in Vietnam. They were the one element in Saigon that could not be controlled: Diem controlled his press, his military, his legislature; Harkins his reporting channels, and Nolting his. The only people who could be candid were the American reporters. “Get on the team,” Admiral Harry Felt told Malcolm Browne of the AP. “Stop looking for the hole in the doughnut,” Ambassador Nolting enjoined reporters. John Richardson, the head of the CIA in Saigon, spoke enviously to colleagues of how the Communists...

But the questions they brought up were the smaller ones. They too did not challenge the given, and by accepting it, they too failed (had they challenged the very premise of the war, they would undoubtedly have been shipped out the next day). Only in the latter part of 1963 and in early 1964 did they begin to perceive that the problem was not just Diem, that Diem was simply a symptom of a larger failure and that the real problem had its roots in the French Indochina war. By then it was very late. Fifteen years earlier in China, restless young State Department officials had played the same role as the reporters did, had conveyed what they saw without jeopardy to their jobs. Now that kind of reporting could not be done through State and had to be done through independent newspapers. But the State Department people had been area experts and thus recognized immediately the root causes of what they saw on the surface, which the young American journalists in Vietnam lacked the sophistication to do (unlike the official personnel, they knew that our program did not work, but unlike their State Department predecessors in China they were not able to trace the reason back far enough why it failed. Whereas the State Department officials in China saw their pessimism come to its logical conclusion—that the United States did not belong in China—the reporters in 1962 and early 1963 did not yet see the parallel in Vietnam). Like everything else in Saigon, the American press did not work qui...

This man, whose only real experience had been in dealing with the second largest automotive empire in the world, producing huge Western vehicles, was the last man to understand and measure the problems of a people looking for their political freedom. Yet he was very much a man of the Kennedy Administration. He symbolized the idea that it could manage and control events, in an intelligent, rational way. Taking on a guerrilla war was like buying a sick foreign company; you brought your systems to it.

Mcnamara

One was always aware of his time; speak quickly and be gone, make your point, in and out, keep the schedule, lunch from 1:50 to, say, expansively, 2 p.m., and above all, do not engage in any philosophical discussions, Well, Bob, my view of history is . . . No one was to abuse his time. Do not, he told his aides, let people brief me orally. If they are going to make a presentation, find out in advance and make them put it on paper. “Why?” an aide asked. A cold look. “Because I can read faster than they can talk.” There were exceptions to this, and one of the most notable was his interest in 1966 in an electronic barrier for Vietnam as a means of stopping the infiltration (and thus the rationale for bombing); suddenly this took top priority and General Alfred Starbird, who was in charge of it, had access to him at any time and could always brief him orally. The boredom he showed when the JCS came over once a week was in sharp contrast to the interest he had when General Starbird was talking. Those who wasted his time—except of course those above him—would feel his cold stare,

Mcnamara

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.

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.”

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 inten...

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.

At Berkeley he was remembered as a student with a broadly based education and interests. His proficiency in math was beginning to show through, and his own grades came so easily that he had time to read and work in other courses. His professors assumed that he would become a teacher; he did not seem to have the kind of drive, the hustle, which one felt went with a business career; he seemed a little more scholarly. Those were good years, summers spent gold mining (unsuccessfully), climbing mountains, a sport which he quickly came to love, learning to ski, which he went at in typical McNamara style: find out your weaknesses and work on them, and then keep working on them. Man could conquer all by discipline, and will, and rationality.

Together they decided that in order to harness American industry for the great war effort, they needed first and foremost a giant statistical brain to tell them who they were, what was needed, and where. They asked Harvard Business School, the most logical place, to train the officers they needed for statistical control. This brain trust would send the right men and the right supplies to the right places, and would make sure that when crews arrived at a base there were enough instructors. It was a symbolic step in America’s going from a relatively sleepy country toward becoming a superpower (a step which the acceleration in air power and air industry would finalize). We were already so big that our problem primarily concerned control as well as careful and accurate projection of just how powerful we were. (It was significant that twenty years later, when we were an acknowledged superpower, when Kennedy looked for a Secretary of Defense he turned to someone who was not really a production man, but the supreme accountant, determination of what we needed being more essential than the qualities of the old-style professional production man who ramrodded manufacturing schedules through, who went by instinct, and who knew nothing about systems control.)

But when the B-29 was being developed, he was pulled from other programs. This was to become the major project for the Air Force, the long-range bomber which was to prove so vital during the last year of the war, but first it needed to be organized and systematized. Other men would make their reputations on the development of the B-29, but Thornton later claimed that the genius of the operation was the young McNamara, putting all the infinitely complicated pieces together, doing program analysis, operation analysis, digesting the mass of facts which would have intimidated less disciplined minds, less committed minds, making sure that the planes and the crews were readied at roughly the same time. Since all this took place before the real age of computers, he had to work it out himself. He was the intelligence bank of the project, and he held the operation together, kept its timing right, kept it all on schedule. It was an awesome performance for a man not yet thirty.

Their chief lesson had been that you could control an organization by converting an abundance of facts and figures into meaningful data and then apply them to industrial production; these men were purveyors of what would be a new managerial art in American industry.

The lead of General Motors in that postwar period was enormous: Ford had very little in the way of a factory, its machinery was badly outdated, not easily retooled. In contrast, GM had converted to war production, but it had been very careful to establish in its factory and production lines the kind of systems that could be easily converted to peacetime production. Chevy thus had a massive lead; it could bring out a car for much less than it actually did, but if it lowered its prices it would kill Chrysler and bring the wrath of the Congress down for antitrust. (“Don’t ever hire anyone from the auto industry,” Gene McCarthy, one of McNamara’s severest critics later said of him. “The way they have it rigged it’s impossible to fail out there.”) So Chevy kept its prices higher and produced a much better car than Ford. The true difference between Ford and Chevy then was reflected in the used-car market: a two-year-old Chevy sold on the used-car market for about $200 more than a two-year-old Ford, a very considerable gap. The prime aim of the two new management teams at Ford was to close the gap. Here Breech and McNamara combined their talents; they had to figure out how to produce a car that was at least partially competitive with Chevrolet, and at the same time make enough profit that could be plowed back into the company to build the desperately needed plants. They could not do it by borrowing from the banks, Ford’s credit rating simply wasn’t good enough, so they did it by ...

The night each year when they got hold of the first Chevy, everyone gathered around in a special room and broke it down piece by piece into hundreds of items, each one stapled to a place already laid out for it, and they concentrated on it—no brain surgeon ever concentrated more—everyone muttering, wondering how Chevy had done this or that for a tenth of a cent less, cursing them slightly—so that was how they had done it!

At Ford what distinguished McNamara was the capacity to bring a detailed financial system to the almost total disorganization of the company. He was brilliant at systematizing, telling Ford where it was going before it got there. He set up a corporate accounting system which reduced the element of surprise in the business. His system of rewards for reducing costs provided incentive (though occasionally, in the view of his critics there, the system backfired, the rewards going to people and ideas whose efficiency would be only short-range). He rose quickly because he was moving in something of a vacuum. Henry Ford was new and unsure of himself, particularly in the field of financial systems. To an uneasy, uncertain Ford, McNamara offered reassurance; when questions arose he always seemed to have the answers, not vague estimates but certitudes, facts, numbers, and lots of them. Though his critics might doubt that he knew what the public wanted or what it was doing, he could always forecast precisely the Ford part of the equation. He had little respect for much of the human material he found around him, the people who claimed, when he reeled off his overwhelming statistics, that they had always done it the other way in the auto business. Such people, when they challenged him, were often proved wrong. Slowly he surrounded himself with men who met his criteria, men who responded to the same challenges and beliefs, and he would respect their judgments. This was a formative exper...

McNamara was never of Detroit and never really of the auto industry. They were backslappers, good fellows, and he was never one for slapped backs, his or theirs. While they frolicked, he plowed through the unabridged Toynbee.

In business philosophy as well as personal life McNamara was a puritan, and the auto business is not the place for a puritan, nor is it necessarily the place for someone who has an abiding faith in man as a rational being committing rational acts. The buying of a car is not necessarily a rational act; it takes more than the transportation aspect to sell a car. Detroit is and always has been happiest when it can foist on a potential customer more than he needs, adding chrome, hard tops, soft tops, air conditioners, speakers, extra horsepower. McNamara was different; he thought the customer should be rational, and worse, in the eyes of some colleagues, he thought he was rational. The auto industry essentially believes the buying of a car is an impulse; McNamara insisted it was a rational decision. It pained him to approve a convertible, the idea that a customer would pay $200 more for a dangerous car that would deteriorate more rapidly offended him (after he left Ford and they made a convertible version out of his beloved Falcon he wrote a rare message to a friend at Ford: “You must be crazier than hell”). He believed deeply in the simple utilitarian car, that it was a raw, functional thing, that man seeks the highest form of efficiency without grace, and without psychological feelings at all. His opponents in the auto industry argued that this is not the way the world is, and in particular, it is not the way the auto industry is; man will opt for comfort and status every ti...

But it was as if McNamara felt that there were certain things which were good for people and other things which were bad, and he would be the arbiter, he knew better than they. It was, said one friend, a quiet kind of arrogance. One of his colleagues thought he should have been the head of production at the Moskva works in the Soviet Union, the utilitarian man producing the utilitarian car for the utilitarian society, no worry about frills there. If he hadn’t gone to work at Ford, thought another, he’d still be teaching at the Harvard Business School, probably happier, driving a VW to work and laughing like hell at all the fools around him with their big cars and automatic transmissions. He not only believed in rationality, thought a friend, he loved it. It was his only passion.

“If you offended it at a meeting, you were not just wrong, you had violated something far greater, you had violated his sense of the rational order. Like offending a man’s religion.” If you did show a flash of irrationality or support the wrong position, he would change, speaking faster, the voice like a machine gun, cutting into you: chop chop chop. You miscalculated here. Chop. You left this out. Chop. You neglected this. Chop. Therefore you’re wrong. Chop. Chop. Chop. He was a powerhouse at those meetings, driving things through, always in great command, doing his own homework, never respecting those who did not (later when he was at the Pentagon a general would turn at a meeting and ask a colonel for the answer to a question, and it would be the general’s last appearance around McNamara). His power was facts, no one had more, and no one used them better, firing them out, one after another, devastating his opponents (though sometimes friends would feel that there was a missing piece, that sometimes this brilliant reasoning was based, yes, on a false assumption). He was, if anything, too strong a personality; he so dominated meetings that other men felt submerged and suppresse...

The men around him began to shade things in talking to him, not really lies, just a certain hedging of the truth to please him. For instance, McNamara wanted a two-speed automatic transmission, so he promoted a design which would perform as well as a three-speed but cost less. There were considerable doubts that the two-speed would work as well, but he was finally given assurances that it would; the engineers wanted it to work because he wanted it to work, because there would be bonuses and smiles of approval, but sadly it never did; it performed durably but sluggishly, just as his critics had predicted.

But after he left, Lee Iacocca, who would eventually succeed him, said that Bob McNamara had damn near ruined Ford by pushing that Falcon, too simple a car, with too small a profit for the company. Iacocca symbolized exactly the opposite of McNamara in the auto world. For instance, he brought racing to Ford, and Henry liked that, Henry pictured with his pretty new wife in Europe after having virtually bought Le Mans, an invasion of American power and industry somewhat short of that flashed on D-Day. McNamara hated all that, hated racing, and now here was Henry and the Ford name advertising for it. Lee brought in the Mustang, a car designed for the American consumer in just the way McNamara’s cars were not. They had looked at the design and thought, we have a doll of a car and people will buy it, and now let’s figure out how to build it. Lee liked bigger, plusher, flashier cars, and to him the Falcon was a reminder that Ford might be growing customers for GM, bringing them into auto consumption, and then as they grew wealthier, turning them over to GM, which was stronger in the middle range of cars. So Lee was critical of McNamara, and so occasionally was Henry Ford, now more confident, now more his own man, and sometimes given to making statements which indicated a measure of disenchantment with McNamara, that perhaps the good old-style auto people were better than the new intellectuals.

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 te...

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 oil in the wheels of government was bourbon.

(In 1962 McNamara, always cost-conscious, came charging into the White House ready to save millions on the budget by closing certain naval bases. All the statistics were there. Close this base, save this many dollars. Close that one and save that much more. All obsolete. All fat. Each base figured to the fraction of the penny. Kennedy interrupted him and said, Bob, you’re going to close the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with twenty-six thousand people, and they’re going to be out of work and go across the street and draw unemployment, and you better figure that into the cost. That’s going to cost us something and they’re going to be awfully mad at me, and we better figure that in too. So Kennedy ended the closing down, but in 1964 under Johnson, McNamara came right back with the same proposals. Johnson, who loved economy, particularly little economies, light-switch economies, was more interested in the idea until Kenny O’Donnell, who had become one of McNamara’s more constant critics within the government and who would later argue vociferously with Bobby Kennedy that most of the mistakes of the Kennedy era had stemmed from McNamara, pointed out that the shipyards always tended to be in the districts of key congressmen, men like John McCormack and John Rooney, and though it saved a few million, it might cost them the Rules Committee.)

McNamara, who had unleashed these young men elsewhere in the Pentagon, moved virtually alone in an area where he was least equipped to deal with the problems, where his training was all wrong, the quantifier trying to quantify the unquantifiable.

And there was that confidence which bordered on arrogance, a belief that he could handle it. Perhaps, after all, the military weren’t all that good; still, they could produce the raw data, and McNamara, who knew data, would go over it carefully and extricate truth from the morass. Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies. Talking with reporters and telling them that all the indices were good. He could not have been more wrong; he simply had all the wrong indices, looking for American production indices in an Asian political revolution.

Hilsman had risen quickly in the bureaucracy; Kennedy liked him particularly because he was unafraid to challenge the military. One challenge was particularly memorable. At one of the first crisis meetings on Laos, General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had shown up at the White House in order to brief the President, and suffered a mild humiliation at the White House gate. Since the police there were not prepared for him and his staff, his aides were not allowed to enter, so Lem had to struggle through carrying his charts and cases all by himself. A greater humiliation lay ahead. Lemnitzer began his briefing, charts ready, pointer poised. First the big picture: This is the Mekong Valley. Pointer tip hit the map. Hilsman, watching, noticed something, the point tip was not on the Mekong Valley, it was on the Yangtze Valley. Hilsman rose, went to the board, took the pointer. “General,” he said, “you’re mistaken, the Mekong Valley is right here.” A switch of the pointer. But Lem’s humiliation was not over. Hilsman did not sit down but continued the briefing, pointing out the key features of the Valley until finally the President said, “Mr. Hilsman, would you mind letting us hear the military briefing from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff . . .” Later, when Hilsman was teased about this by friends, he protested, “But he was pointing at the wrong river . . .” It was this very audaciousness which delighted Kennedy, the willingness to take on the milit...

It was convenient for McNamara to stick to these statistics, since they were not only the thing he knew best, but more important, by holding to them he did not get into a fight with his generals over the failure of the existing policy, and thus perhaps have to confront the pressure for a new, expanded policy. He simply froze his attitude: it was all going well, the statistics were there to prove it, and he was not interested in trying to find out why there were two different sets of information, and what lay behind the difference. Civilians traveling around with him to Saigon in those days found him surprisingly rigid; they tried to discuss their doubts with him but he would not really listen. When they said the Diem government was losing popularity with the peasants because of the Buddhist crisis, McNamara asked, well, what percentage was dropping off, what percentage did the government have and what percentage was it losing? He asked for facts, some statistics, something he could run through the data bank, not just this poetry they were spouting. And as far as charges that his data bank was corrupt and unbalanced, reflecting only the vested-interest optimism of the government and of MACV—why, their data bank was just as corrupt. They now factored in only people who had doubts, they did not listen to anyone who was optimistic. This was a very revealing insight into McNamara. Both at Ford and at the Pentagon he had always loved statistics and facts, particularly those whic...

In a world of achievers he was a non-achiever. In 1963 Sarris was, however, briefly important because Hilsman, his superior, fought for him and for his opinions. So, encouraged by Hilsman, Sarris carefully pieced together a major report. He used some of State’s material, some journalistic accounts and a good deal of the military’s own reporting to compile an estimate which showed that the war effort was slipping away, that the Buddhist crisis was undoubtedly hurting it (he tied the Buddhist crisis to the war effort, and on this he may well have been wrong; the Buddhist crisis and the decline in the war effort coincided, but the military decline may have been based on more deeply rooted problems). Sarris knew exactly what figures to take from the military’s accounts (in effect most things, but never the bottom line), and the result was a devastating report on the course of the war.