April 11, 1963
Page 6485
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ROBERT McNAMARA
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, several committees of both the House and Senate are deeply involved in questions of defense policy, the structure of our Department of Defense, and the organization of our Armed Forces. At the center of every such inquiry is the Secretary of Defense, a man of great intelligence, immense capability, force, and integrity. Secretary Robert McNamara is a decisive man. He is, therefore, a controversial man.
I know that many Senators are concerned with several areas of defense policy and decisions. Therefore, I think, it is important to bring to their attention an important and penetrating article entitled "Revolution in the Pentagon," written by Theodore H. White, and published in the April 23 issue of Look magazine. Mr. White is a distinguished reporter and author. I am sure Senators will find his observations enlightening and helpful in considering the problems of the Pentagon and the kind of administration which Secretary McNamara is directing. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the body of the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as f follows:
REVOLUTION IN THE PENTAGON
(By Theodore H. White)
No office in Washington receives a visitor more peacefully than the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
This tranquil chamber -- white-walled, high-ceilinged, beige-carpeted -- calms the visitor as much with its vast dimensions as with its hush. Certainly, it gives no hint that this is the most dangerous of all the ornate command posts of Washington leadership.
Yet it is. Eight Secretaries of Defense have occupied this post. One or two survived the ordeal with vigor and honor. But for the most part, here famous captains of industry have been stripped of magic and sent home, ham-fisted politicians defeated, great national heroes gutted of their vitality. And one, his reason cracking under the strain that pulses here, jumped from a window and killed himself.
This is, therefore, a room of peril. Yet no foreign enemy creates the peril -- it is shaped by dedicated Americans whose imagination, will, and passion clash at peak intensity in this room over the policies the Secretary of Defense must set. For more than 15 years, until now, no one has been able to say who was master of the forces gathered here.
There is little to tell the roving eye that today matters have changed in this room. The paint has been freshened; the battle paintings on the wall have been replaced by color blowups of the High Sierras. A cheap black-and-white Rouault print, crudely pasted to the glass of its frame, is a new touch at this level of American command. But the Rouault faces a man who sits, as all the Secretaries of Defense have sat, behind the same 8½-foot-long General Pershing desk. Beyond him is the traditional General Sherman table. The remorseless wall clock, with its sweep hand and its chart, marks the same globe-girdling problems that tormented his predecessors -- problems ranging from CINCEUR in Paris (operating on ZULU time plus 1, which is 6 hours later than Washington time) to CINCPAC in Hawaii (on ZULU time minus 10, 5 hours earlier than Washington time).
The change in this room can be measured neither in decor nor in charts, for this room disposes of power, and the nature of power is that it is felt -- not seen. No sign announces here that the striking force of America's homeland reserve has tripled in 2 years, while abroad its political response has changed from 1961's nervous search for compromise in Laos to 1962's hammer blow poised to frustrate Khrushchev's Cuban attempt.
The man who has captained this change, Robert Strange McNamara, eighth Secretary of Defense, is already, after the President and his brother, the most important man in the American government. Power becomes him -- gravely and easily. As you walk across the long Mussolini-sized room to visit Robert McNamara, you find the Secretary's eyes fixed on what he is reading, his left hand penciling the tiny cramped handwriting now famous in the Pentagon. He does not lift his eyes until you are right there standing before him. This, of course, is disconcerting. It will also be disconcerting when he silently dismisses you by dropping his eyes to the memorandum you interrupted. But this is McNamara, the man in white shirt sleeves, the IBM machine with legs, the man whose brown eyes behind the rimless, oval-cut eyeglasses are emotionless.
It is difficult to associate this McNamara with the man who, pacing the large room late one night during his first few weeks in office, burst out, "I tell you this place is a jungle -- a jungle." It is difficult also to associate the muscular quality of the tall body, the high, inflectionless voice, the slick black hair with the surgical quality of his thought. It is, lastly, difficult to associate this McNamara with the bubbling-charming evening McNamara, one of the most completely engaging dinner companions on Washington's inner social circuit. But the evening McNamara must wait on the man behind this desk, for the daytime McNamara is an artist of a particular kind who has, after 2 years, created news that should now be recorded.
First, the civilian authority in American Government has won full control of the power of the Pentagon.
Second, American striking power is in a historic process of multiplication and change,
Third, the purpose and use of this power have been redefined.
These are developments of vast importance. Translated into simpler language, they mean that if America's leaders invite Americans to die in battle or under bombardment in the next few years, it will be by reasonable decision, rather than by accident or spastic reaction. This may seem like a simple achievement.
But to explain how it happened is a complicated story, reaching back through 15 years of merciless strife and chaos, as generals, admirals, scientists, and statesmen -- all seeking American security -- set their hands, one against the other, in the corridors of this building.
The story starts in 1945 with the destruction of the U.S. Army in its hour of triumph. Americans did not demobilize their magnificent Army, they destroyed it. So swift and chaotic was the dismantling of the Nation's force around the world, as homesick GI's rioted from Marseilles to Manila, that all prospect of a reasonable and expectable balance of strength with the war-weary Russians evaporated in a few months. American ground power ceased to exist. So did the airlift and mobility that made this power global. Ten months after V-E day, the 3.5 million Americans (68 combat divisions) in Europe had shrunk to 400,000. The 149 American air groups that had reduced Germany to rubble were sinking to their nadir of two combat wings; and in all the United States, the combat backup of this force was 90 bombers, 460 fighter planes -- and only 175 first-class pilots to man them.
Seized with the belief that the world was at peace, Americans cut their arms budget to a low of $9.7 billion (which, in 1948, maintained only one combat division in Europe). Within the confines of this ever-contracting budget, America's generals and admirals swiftly learned to fight first over money, then over strategy.
The Korean war reversed matters momentarily. But once it was over, American ground power again shriveled. And since no reasoned strategy could rest on a ground force whose combat strength shot up and down like a yo-yo (from 12 divisions in 1950 to 23 in 1952 and 14 in 1960), American strategy, by default, began to tailor itself to a single new instrument, SAC -- the Strategic Air Command, which sheltered all the Western World with its ability to wipe out Russia.. SAC was a reflection of the scientific, rather than political, "input" in Pentagon thinking.
While the world abroad went from political explosion to more dramatic political explosion, American science went from technological breakthrough to more dramatic breakthrough, pouring the most dazzling developments into SAC. Nuclear physics leaped from fission to fusion bombs; new transistors invited ultra-swift new computers; these, wedding to rocketry development, ushered in the age of intercontinental missiles. The weapons they spawned created industries, then entire communities, dependent solely on weapons-systems decisions in Washington. Strategic decisions became live-or-die sentences for communities (from Suffolk County, N.Y., to San Diego, Calif.) whose political and industrial leaders intruded in the squabbles of the Pentagon.
The most experienced leadership would have had difficulty in absorbing such a torrent of "input." But the Pentagon from 1947 on was under new management. In 1947, Congress decided to make the Army, Navy, Air Force all equal and to place over them an instrument and a man entirely new to U.S. history -- an Office and a Secretary of Defense to "coordinate." What "coordinate" meant, Congress never defined. As if giving each nominee a "may-the-best man-win" sendoff, it ratified seven successive Secretaries, and tossed each of them into the Pentagon ambuscades to explore what his true authority was.
The game, as it was played, could have been called: "Who's Boss Now?" Who really directed American military posture -- civilian or military, amateur or professional? Who had the right to make what claim on America's total resources? For what defense purposes?
It was a lethal game. James Forrestal, a fragile man, was the first Secretary at bat. Neurotic, he thought of himself as being beaten by the uniforms and jumped to his death. Only in retrospect has he come to be recognized as a truly creative boss. After Forrestal, on the other hand, apparent victors in the game turned out to be Pentagon patsies. The toughest civilian team installed in the Pentagon was that of Charles E. (Engine Charlie) Wilson and Roger Kyes, both imported from General Motors. Pentagon generals still wince at the remembered rudeness of Wilson, and Kyes' treatment of one general is legendary. "I didn't come down here to shovel snow," said Kyes to the general. Then, bending over, he flicked the general's stars and continued, "I came down here to pluck stars." But such apparently "tough" civilians could be briefed, flattered, outwitted and finally absorbed by generals and admirals who systematically study all leadership patterns among men, from Red Square to Wall Street. By the end of the Eisenhower administration, control of American strategy lay not in the hands of civilian leadership, but in the hands of the uniformed Chiefs of Staff.
This was tragedy. The duty of a Secretary of Defense is to get out of the Pentagon that kind of power which best advances the policies of America over the turbulent globe. If the Secretary fails to interpret to the Pentagon what kind of power his President wants, then power makes its own rules and strategy, like an inertially guided missile that moves only by interior technical reference.
This was tragedy, most of all for generals and admirals. The decay of civilian leadership should have made them happy. But it did not. They could no more agree among themselves as to what was a right and proper American military effort than could a college debating society. Year in, year out, in gross and detail, the Chiefs of Staff battled each other over disposition of American resources. Occasionally, their bitterness and anguish burst into the open -- as when a general publicly denounced the admirals before Congress as "Fancy Dans." Occasionally, two services ganged up on a third -- as happened in 1956, when the Air Force and Navy agreed to all but abolish the Army, reducing it to a civil defense police force at home and a number of atomic task forces abroad. (A calculated Army press leak exploded that plan before it got off the ground.)
Occasionally, civilians, too, were destroyed -- as when the Air Force shot down Robert Oppenheimer, the genius who tooled the first atom bomb, because it suspected him of forcing the Air Force to share its monopoly of atomic weapons with the Army and Navy.
Gradually, a pattern developed. Within the Air Force, the elite corps of SAC dominated thinking, and the Air Force thus spoke for the strategy of "massive retaliation," a strategy pleasing to both the most ferocious and most economy-minded American political thinkers. The Army spoke for a strategy of "flexible response," pleading, through spokesmen like Maxwell Taylor and James Gavin, for the manpower and equipment to face the changes of a changing world. The Navy was the cat that walked by itself, casting its vote, when it had to, for massive retaliation against flexible response.
Civilians controlled the feuding service chieftains mainly through budget recommendations. Gradually, strategy became the offspring of the budget. The Chiefs of Staff finally arrived at a bitter budgetary compromise, behind the blurred words of which lay this formula: Of any sum appropriated for defense, the Army would have 23 percent, the Navy 28 percent, the Air Force 46 per cent. Under the compromise, each service planned its own future war against Russia: each had its own intelligence net and its own supply system; each had its own missile program. The plans might not fit, of course. The Army had plans for airlifting emergency reinforcements to meet a threat in Europe, but the Air Force had no plans for providing the matching lift. The Army planned for a long war and stockpiled 2 years of some combat consumables; the Air Force planned for a short war and stockpiled a few weeks of combat consumables. But all three services felt they were ready -- more or less.
Thus, at the beginning of March 1961, barely 6 weeks after his inauguration, John F. Kennedy gathered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider the Communist thrust in Laos. At this point, clarity struck. For, as the new President sat down in the long, gloomy Cabinet room off the White House rose garden to inquire what he might do to meet the threat, he found this: The forces at his disposal were incredible -- or else they were a joke. He might, if he chose, unleash the frightful power of SAC, which could wipe out any capital on earth with a spasm of its muscles. But, short of that, he was told, the Armed Forces could provide only a few combat teams for an operation in Laos, provided the emergency lasted no more than 30 days and there was no crisis in Berlin. Those present recall the President's disbelief. Unwilling to risk total war over Laos, the United States would have to settle for what it could get. Matters would grow worse in the next few months as Cuba followed Laos and Berlin followed Cuba.
Yet, by this time, a superior if civilian intelligence had begun to examine the ailing American giant whose cramped muscles could respond to crisis in only one way with a single cataclysmic spasm. Robert Strange McNamara had taken over at the Pentagon and was trying to find out how to restore flexibility to American power.
Robert McNamara, the new man in charge of the musclebound giant, was in 1961 no stranger to the Pentagon. During World War II, he had served an apprenticeship (as captain) in the building's C-3 ring, where he could look out over an air well and get what is called a "bowel view" of Pentagon leadership.
McNamara, then 26 years old, was by all accounts a rather perplexing fellow, as he had been since school days. One of his earliest friends remembers him from high school (where he was president of the yearbook, president of the French club, a member of the glee club, and a member of the board of student control). With the puzzlement that characterizes all memories of him, she says, "He was so painfully good; he was so neat, so clean; he was the kind of boy you'd trust with either your money or your sick kittens. But when I say that, I make him sound like a square. Yet he wasn't, he wasn't -- a square is an object of ridicule, and Bob was a great talker, a good dancer; it was always fun to have him around. He was never left out of anything."
McNamara moved brilliantly from high school to college (the University of California), made Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. After going on to Harvard Business School, he married Margaret Craig, of San Francisco, and later became an assistant professor at the school. "We were all broke," recalls Eugene Zuckert, a junior dean at the business school, now Secretary of the Air Force. "We were all kids then, and the McNamaras lived at Morris Hall, and we would go out to parties just to sneak some punch. But smack at 10:30, the McNamaras would go home to bed, because he had to be ready for work the next day."
It was McNamara's teaching specialty -- statistical control-- that brought him to the Pentagon in midwar. (He had wanted to volunteer after Pearl Harbor, had instead been assigned to teach his specialty to Army Air Force officers at Harvard.) The war, at this point, was giving Americans their first experience in dealing swiftly with waterfalls of data under emergency conditions. For the first time, men were groping for instantaneous decisions based on calculations involving thousands of miles, millions of human beings, billions of gallons of gasoline. After months of instructing air officers in such methods of calculation, McNamara, in February 1943, decided simply to join them.
There is little romance to statistical control -- its purpose is to dump the drudgery of calculation on computers and machines. The supervising human is required only to think: first, to pose questions to the calculators; and finally, once questions have conscripted answering data, to make decisions on the basis of such data. It was in these statistical vineyards that McNamara first labored, then starred.
The ability to ask the proper questions governing oceans of data is rare today. It was even rarer in 1945. When the war ended, McNamara and a band of nine AAF companions were invited to move as a package (called the Quiz Kids) from Pentagon desks to the ailing Ford Motor Co. McNamara was 29 when he arrived to probe Ford with his questions. The giant company, the outstanding invalid of the prewar automobile industry, was once again facing financial crisis with the end of military production. When McNamara left Ford as president, 14 years later, the company had an annual net profit of $427 million.
In Michigan, as everywhere else, there were always the two McNamaras. The Ford or daytime McNamara was a paragon of efficiency. Tough enough to recommend, as division chief, that Ford liquidate its Edsel venture and admit its $250 million error, he foreshadowed the man who could later wipe out the half-billion-dollar Skybolt project with the same surgical precision.
The evening McNamara lived in a rambling, white-trimmed brick Tudor house at Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, 30 miles from Detroit. The evening McNamara was a contributor to the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, a recognized egghead in a university community. This McNamara, a vivid, rambling conversationalist, first joined a monthly discussion group of 10 of Ann Arbor's leading businessmen-intellectuals. Then, his curiosity unslaked, he helped Prof. Ralph Gerard, the university's distinguished neurophysiologist, organize another evening discussion group of out-and-out eggheads (an art historian, a sociologist, a physicist, several professors, two other business executives) to explore ideas in new books.
The evening McNamara was home folks. When discussion groups met at the McNamara home, Mrs. McNamara served; the house remained comfortable, not fancy -- a place "where you found kids' boots and kids' hockey sticks stacked in the entryway, not a picked-up house," says one friend. But the daytime McNamara was rising rapidly from division to division at Ford. As the salary of the once-broke professor climbed from Ford's $12,000 starting stipend to the $420,000 of 1960, the McNamaras became contributors -- to civic improvement in Ann Arbor and Detroit, to an effort to establish an art theater in Michigan, and to politics. Now, high-minded, non-favor-seeking political contributors are as scarce in politics as albino candidates. And as McNamara contributed across the board to Republicans here, Democrats there, be began to appear on the radar screens of politicians. But it was difficult to label him: In 1960, he gave his dollars and support to Prof. Paul Bagwell, Republican candidate for Governor, and Senator John F. Kennedy, Democratic candidate for President.
One cannot linger long over the dramatic timing that brought John F. Kennedy to the Presidency of the United States on Tuesday, November 8, 1960, and Robert S. McNamara to the presidency of the Ford Motor Co. the next day; or the frantic screening of the horizon by the Kennedy staff for a Secretary of Defense; or how McNamara's name was raised again and again during the hunt -- by Wall Streeters, labor leaders, politicians, business leaders.
Two items of testimony stand out. The first is from the President's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, now Chief of the Peace Corps, who on December 7, 1960, flew to Michigan to explore with Robert McNamara two jobs -- Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Treasury. Shriver recalls that he was impressed by several things: The matter-of-fact way that McNamara moved to a discussion of the posts -- without surprise, or arrogance, or false modesty, or self-deprecation; the ease with which he could rattle off the three or four main problems of both the Treasury and Defense; his worry about deserting the Fords, who had just made him president, and his total indifference to money. According to Shriver, McNamara leaned back in his chair at one point and remarked that, of course, he'd have to give up any stock or options in Ford; and that this would cost him several million dollars. "You know," McNamara added, "I've got more money now than anybody in my family ever dreamed of having. I've got more money than I'm ever going to need or use." He straightened his chair, and that was that. ("Like that," says Shriver. "That was all there was to the matter.")
The second item comes from his friend Congressman Neil Staebler, then Democratic national committeeman in Michigan, with whom McNamara discussed the Defense post the night before his decision. "It was as if” says Staebler, "McNamara were asking the question: 'Why should I hire McNamara for the job?' -- as if McNamara were trying to see McNamara as the President saw him. It was as if he were trying to write a report on himself to himself. Could the job be done? Could you get all the people involved at the Pentagon to agree? Could the thing truly be unified? McNamara had seen enough throat cutting at Ford to prepare anybody for the Pentagon - - but did anybody have the power to unify the Pentagon? And then, finally -- I can't remember the words -- there was this phrase: That maybe nobody could do the job; that maybe he couldn't last 6 months; maybe nobody was qualified; but that after all, he had been asked, and therefore he would try."
About 10 day later, Bob McNamara visited the then Secretary of Defense, Thomas Gates, for what was to be a short briefing on the duties he was about to assume. The session ran to 6 hours.
When it was over, so the story is told at the White House, McNamara returned to the Ford Motor Co. suite at the Shoreham Hotel and telephoned President elect Kennedy. "I've just been over talking with Tom Gates," said McNamara, "and you know -- I think I can do that job."
Oh, Kennedy is said to have replied. Well, you know, I've been talking to Eisenhower this morning. And I think I can do that job too.
With this, the takeover of the Pentagon began.
To take over the military establishment of the United States is a stupefying task, rendered even more difficult than it might otherwise be by the stupefying character of the Pentagon itself.
Squat and ugly, dank and drafty, the tawny building on the Potomac mud flats is one of the most bleakly depressing anthills in the world. The first of its qualities is that it is huge. An enormous labyrinth of 7,000 offices, 1,900 toilets, 150 staircases, 17½ miles of dingy corridors, it rouses in almost all its 25,000 working citizens, whether clerks or generals, the fear they may be lost and forgotten. The second of its qualities, for those who are not lost and forgotten, is tension. Though promising young officers, just in from healthy field duty, insist that their new ulcers, headaches, flu and colds are symptoms of a specific disease called Pentagonitis, the medical staff of the Pentagon insists there is no such disease -- it is simply nerves. And nervous tension increases at the Pentagon the higher one rises in the hierarchy. At the heights, the effects of an alternation between the humiliation of obedience and the ecstasy of command become more acute.
To understand the Pentagon, it is essential to grasp one fact -- that only a handful of men in the building are important. Cut a wedge out of the huge perimeter between the fashionable Mall and River entrances; slice off this wedge the outer rim, the sunlit E ring; make the slice two layers thick, the 2d and 3rd floors -- and then, in this tiny sliver of the world's biggest office building, you have trapped the 20 or 30 men who shape the military policy and strategy of America.
A new Secretary of Defense has only two ways of imposing his authority on the 3,500,000 men and women of the American Military Establishment, all of whom get orders from this building: One is by power of the budget; the second, by power of appointment. And since men write budgets, not vice versa, one should look first at the 20 or 30 individuals who direct the Nation's military effort -- at the small team of civilians who man the Defense, Army, Navy, and Air Force policy staffs, then at the team of generals and admirals they are supposed to select and supervise in running the services and commands. Rarely, indeed, have both civilians and military teams offered so romantic an inter- twining of old and new in American tradition as McNamara's teams, which now, after 2 years, show the Secretary's emerging touch.
One is struck immediately, for example, by how top-heavy McNamara's choices have been in ivy leaguers. Deputy to McNamara, second man in the Department, is Roswell L. Gilpatric, Yale; followed by another Yale as Secretary of the Army, another Yale as Secretary of the Air Force, another Yale as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower. A Harvard man and a Yale man serve as first and second in Defense's International Security Affairs Section, and a Princeton man serves as Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs. Yet it would be a narrow view to consider such a concentration of fashionable ivy-leaguers as an expression of social connections. All through the Kennedy administration runs the most intense, if unrecognized, desire to attach itself to the older traditions of American Government. And the Gilpatric-Vance-Zuckert-Nitze team at the Pentagon can be seen as the direct descendant of the great Ivy League team of Stimson-Lovett-McCloy-Patterson-Forrestal (again predominantly Yale) that directed the American effort in World War II for another President from Harvard, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Smooth, polished, tough under their good manners, the Pentagon's current leaders are men shaped by a tradition of public service almost as old as the uniformed forces they direct. They are part of the invisible web of Government, gossip and private connections that links Pentagon with White House and State.
Yet one tradition can no longer stretch over the vast diversity of American life, and so, as a balance to his ivy-leaguers, McNamara has developed another civilian team that can be called only the think staff. Many journalists have tried to style the think staff: they are called by some, Randsters (for Rand Corp., which so heavily nourished their thinking), or technipols, or Defense intellectuals, or the whiz kids, or the Wizards of ODD. What is common to these people is that almost all of them have been trained since the war either in science or in defense analysis at the direct expense of the armed services of the United States. They are as much children of the Pentagon as its uniformed personnel, and are hated by the leadership of the armed services because now they no longer serve, but apparently direct the generals. If the Ivy League crowd is predominantly east coast New York, then the think staff is predominantly west coast-California. The ivy-leaguers are older; the think staffers are, at first glance, rather academic, generally young, interested in war as a system of intellectual propositions, most at home with a piece of chalk and a blackboard.
It would be too much to inspect all of the top civilians to find the answer to the question: Who runs the Pentagon? Yet, certainly, the leaders of both civilian wings, as they jointly confront the military team, must be examined.
The leaders of the Ivy League team are almost all the kind of men, from the kind of families, who would have gone charging up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt. Chief among them is Roswell Gilpatric, tall, curlyhaired, gray-eyed, Windsor knot to his necktie, an aficionado of Elizabethan poetry and yachting, extraordinarily able, closer to McNamara than anyone else. If ever Gilpatric were to leave his post to go back to his rich New York law practice, then the two chief rivals for the succession would be Paul Nitze (Harvard), silver-haired, graceful, the man chiefly responsible for the new seemingly frictionless alliance of Pentagon and State Department; and Cyrus Vance (Yale), the capable, abrasive, thinly handsome Secretary of the Army. All three are of finest New York polish; all three have moved from good prep schools to good colleges to distinguished marriages; and all three have enough wealth and devotion to make America's welfare their primary concern in life.
The leaders of the think staff wing are more difficult to group and define, partly because there is no hard-and-fast cutoff between Ivy Leaguer administrator and think staffer. Adam Yarmolinsky, for example, McNamara's personal counsel and troubleshooter, bridges both groups. By education Ivy Leaguer, he is by temperament and function a think staffer. So is the Defense Department's General Counsel, the able John McNaughton. Senior among the pure think staffers, however, is probably Charles Hitch, 58, the Department's Comptroller, a mild mannered, gentle Missourian, a one-time professor of economics. Clustered about Hitch are Alain Enthoven, a tall, darkly handsome Seattle-born economist of 32, and Henry S. Rowen, a professorial Bostonian, 37. These three were all research associates at the Air Force's Rand Corp. think factory in Santa Monica, Calif.; all three studied economics at Oxford. All helped transfer the British military doctrine of operations analysis to American military thinking.
To these must be added Dr. Harold Brown (New York, Bronx High School of Science and Columbia), a vastly impressive, if inscrutable man, who at 35 directs the expenditure of $5.5 billion in scientific research and engineering; and his deputy, John Rubel, 42, a lithe and graceful Chicago-born scientist, a thoroughly brilliant and charming man, who like his chief, won his laurels in the west, in California.
Together these are the top civilians who direct the top military team of the Pentagon. Actually, the point where brook meets river, where civilian meshes with military, can be made more precise.
Each Monday afternoon at 2:30, McNamara and Gilpatric (they are so close that their appearance anywhere is called the Bob-and-Ros Act) descend from the third to the second floor, where, off the barred and barricaded ninth corridor, a bay leads to the "tank," the "Gold Room," the meeting place of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Here, around the huge table, scarred by cigarette and cigar butts abandoned in anger at past disputes, McNamara and Gilpatric discuss and decide the problems and plans of American strategy with the uniformed Chiefs of Staff.
Two of the Chiefs are relatively new and untested. The Army Chief of Staff is Gen. Earle 0. Wheeler. Lean, dark, tense, a chain-smoker, Wheeler is the most important new military personality on the Washington scene. Clear and precise of speech he is one of the most lucid thinkers in the Pentagon; all acknowledge this. The criticism of this attractive man comes chiefly from those who insist he is a staff man, not a man of combat command experience. Traditionally, the military thinking of a new administration shows itself in its choice of a new Army Chief of Staff, and Wheeler speaks the language of the new administration. Philosophically a child of the Army's tradition of extreme mobility, Wheeler voices a doctrine that would have appealed to Nathan Bedford Forrest as much as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Had Maxwell Taylor not been available, Wheeler might have won nomination as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to succeed Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer (whose blandness discouraged the administration, which sent him to Paris to soothe NATO). If Wheeler delivers as Army Chief of Staff, he should someday succeed to the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs.
Adm. George W. Anderson, Chief of Naval Operations -- a husky, masculine sailor and the most perfectly typecast of the four Chiefs -- is also relatively untested in high combat command. The U.S. Navy is the closed service; it chooses its own leaders by its own promotion mechanisms, and civilians rarely dare interfere. (It took a near revolt by Congress to save Hyman Rickover when the Navy brotherhood wanted to dismiss the nuclear admiral.) Generally, the Navy offers for civilian ratification as Chief of Naval Operations only its finest, and Anderson runs a superbly efficient Navy. Like all Chiefs of Naval Operations, Anderson feels his basic responsibility is to national security -- and only secondarily to any particular civilian administration installed over him. Traditionally, the Navy has been the most intellectual of the services. But the think staffers who rove the Pentagon have, finally, in this year's budget, also begun to close on the Navy, summoning it to account. And Anderson's resentment is as natural and bitter as that of any salt-sprayed sea dog against any land bound civilian.
Wheeler and Anderson are the lesser Chiefs.
Then there are the greater Chiefs.
What separates the lesser from the greater Chiefs is "presence." America is running out of combat-tested leaders. Both Anderson and Wheeler belong to an untried generation of senior commanders. But the other two Chiefs, Gens. Maxwell Taylor and Curtis E. LeMay, are the last active personalities of America's military age of heroes. These two, when the world was troubled, commanded great forces in anger, and won. They are rivals, as they always have been. Only a respect for each other's achievements keeps them this side of outright clash. For if General LeMay is "Mr. Massive Retaliation" himself, then General Taylor is "Mr. Flexible Response."
General Taylor, 61, has begun to mellow but is still biting of phrase. As newly appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he has returned to the Pentagon from long exile, totally vindicated.
Three years ago, as Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, he bade farewell to the armed services, crushed and dispirited by an Air Force strategy he despised. As a parting volley, he fired at his enemies a book called "The Uncertain Trumpet." No military blast ever hit target more squarely than did his book, which became the military bible of the New Frontiersmen, from the new President to the new Secretary of Defense, on down the line. Invited back to the arena of his torment as master of the beasts, General Taylor is the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs since Omar Bradley to regard civilians as intelligent partners in a joint venture of defense. A soldier loyal to the tradition of his cloth, Taylor indignantly opposes any civilian interference in the choice of military leaders. But he is himself, par excellence, the choice of civilians to command the apparatus of American power.
Contrast Taylor with his archrival, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force: Where Taylor is thin and intellectual (he speaks French, Japanese, German, knows arts, music, science as well as airborne jump tactics), LeMay is burly, bluff, primeval. Taylor is eloquent in argument; LeMay normally grunts. Taylor likes to read classics (in Greek and Latin) or play tennis; LeMay likes to hunt. Now on the defensive, the great LeMay settles down in his chair, silver haired and stout, his tunic unbuttoned, and regards civilian questioners warily, suspiciously, as if they were stalking him. LeMay created SAC. Dutiful, obedient to present strategy, he rumbles like a slumbering volcano. During the Cuban crisis, Taylor was for the escalated response, LeMay for the hard strike. Those who deal with both LeMay and McNamara report that no two men could be further apart in the way they think; yet LeMay has earned McNamara's hard respect. It was LeMay's drive and prowess that for 10 years made SAC the dominant chess piece on the board of world power; and it is behind SAC's shield that McNamara and Taylor have, finally, been able to redeploy the strength of America toward different ends.
The United States owes Curtis LeMay much. But if there is any thread to the story of 2 years of McNamara administration, it is the way in which the use of power has been brought back from LeMay's imagination and restored to civilian hands. In following this thread, we shall see not only how the Pentagon was taken over, but the particular art that distinguishes McNamara from other men.
At the heart of McNamara's art lie questions. The first tattoo rattled out of his office within 4 weeks of his arrival, as drafts of questions, seeking not answers but suggestions as to where and by what deadline answers could be had. Then, 6 weeks after taking office, McNamara fired the broadside known as "McNamara's 96 Trombones" -- the famous 96 questions of March 1, 1961, each tagged with a deadline and the name of the man who must bring in the answer.
What of the missile gap? was a question McNamara had asked even before taking office.
All through 1960, the secret national intelligence estimates reported that Russia had an enormous margin of missile superiority; and appropriate leakage to the press by the armed services had made the gap a matter of clamorous political alarm. Now, on inquiry, it turned out that the separate intelligence services of the Army, Navy, and Air Force each had different measures of the gap and peril but none could offer hard evidence. The Pentagon, McNamara decided, could not afford three rival intelligence services, competing with each other and warping the flow of information in order to bolster particular missile programs. There followed the decision to unify the three intelligence services in a Defense Intelligence Agency, which would coordinate and cross-check all information.
Even before the new Defense Intelligence Agency took over, the use of new intelligence methods had led to periodic reductions in estimates of the size of the missile gap. By September 1961, a major intelligence breakthrough of new sources established firmly that it was America, not Russia, that led in missile capacity -- and by a wide margin. That margin has been maintained. The United States has today something more than 200 ICBM's ready to go, plus almost 200 target-ready Polaris missiles in submarines. It will have about 1,000 on-target missiles ready by the end of 1964, and approximately 2,000 on-target missiles by the end of 1967. Production capacity for the Minuteman is already beyond any current need. For the next 2 years, the U.S. Air Force will be adding on-target missiles at a rate of better than 1 every working day, to give us a total of 800 pushbutton-ready Minutemen by July 1, 1965. Russia's ready missile strength in ICBM's that can hit the United States, is probably under 100. But it is growing.
McNamara's 1961 questions on organization and procedure brought information that the Army, Navy, and Air Force each maintained a division charged with examining its organization and procedure. But the Department of Defense, charged with supervising all three services, had none. Also, some 3,000 committees buzzed through the Pentagon, and McNamara could see little use in many of them. (Over 400 were abolished in his first 6 months in office.) McNamara had pulled Ford out of similar confusion, first by questioning, then by seizing the comptroller's reins.
Now, at the Pentagon, he established in the Secretary of Defense's Staff a brand new Office of Organizational Management. Says an Assistant Secretary, "You must remember that, even in industry, McNamara is a new breed. Most industrial chiefs come up from the production or sales side. McNamara came up through the comptroller's side; in American industry, the comptroller's office is what the party secretary is in Russian Government."
Other McNamara questions probed procurement and supply, budget and arms production. In the years since Korea, electronics, missile, and other new weapons systems had jumped from 12 percent to 52 percent of the Pentagon's annual contract placement. How could competitive bidding be restored in this area of negotiated costs? How could the services be kept from bidding against each other for old-fashioned supplies? How could the missile race between services be controlled? A Defense Supply Agency for procuring all items of common use was set up, and space-missile development was concentrated under the Air Force.
Still other questions probed all international military commitments, from Morocco to Japan; the laboratories, procedures, perspectives of defense science; installations and logistics: Reserves and readiness; control and command. All answers were required to be "comprehensive and complete." Deputies, to spare McNamara from a torrent of paper, tried to boil the answers down. One recalls sending up a 5-page answer. "Back it came in 20 minutes with his own little handwriting: 'This is not sufficiently comprehensive and complete.' So we upped the answer to 9 pages. Back it came again. So I asked him what he wanted, and he looked at me and said, 'Just make it comprehensive and complete!’ We finally gave him a white paper of 16 pages, and it stayed. When you figure there were 96 questions in the first round -- and 34 more later -- you know what his reading must have been."
This lust for detail offended many officers on the Joint Staff as intrusive, juvenile and amateurish. But one must see McNamara's performance for what it really was: an athlete's feat. The mind is a large muscle, and its ability to grasp, sort and organize information can reach an artistry as perfect as an outfielder's leap for a backhand catch. This ability, like any muscular ability, withers apparently with age; but McNamara at 46 possesses it to an extraordinary degree.
He can sit almost impervious to interruption and chatter as he concentrates. His staff knows that, for McNamara, the most important hours are the "alone hours" when he reads and thinks. What he reads, he compresses in notes, absorbs -- and then files. Off his large office is a pantry-like vault lined with loose-leaf notebooks. These are his personal notebooks. Here are all the studies, reports and analyses on which he has penciled the marginal notations that tie the information into a whole.
All this makes Robert McNamara sound a very forbidding man -- unless one enjoys the performance of a beautiful mind at work. Normally, McNamara talks in a dry, reedy voice; but when, in conversation, he begins to clarify a point, patterning new associations, his enthusiasm will begin to carry him away. His voice will rise several decibels, his head will wag back and forth, a huge smile will light his face -- and, suddenly, he is your favorite professor, kindled by the excitement of talk. Whenever a problem becomes complicated, McNamara's zest rises as when he finally devised the questions for a study of military dollar-and-gold outflow. The questions were hunting tools. "Those figures are going to pop out, just pop out," he all but squealed to a friend, as if he had flushed a pheasant out of the bush.
Over the years, the armed services have developed an information-delivery system for their masters that reaches its pinnacle in the Pentagon briefing. A truly great Pentagon briefing, complete with five-colored charts, flip cards, illuminations and slides, photo blowups the size of a wall, colonels dancing attendance and voices in the darkness, is an artistic production, like a ballet. "But briefings," says a close associate of McNamara's, "evaporate like the morning dew.
When the briefers disappear with their charts and slides, you ask yourself: What did they say? McNamara a wants it in writing first, so he can question it, and wants it in writing after they go, so other people can come in and argue with it. That's the way he gets to decision-by asking questions." For the armed services, which had entertained, befuddled and informed a long line of civilian secretaries with briefing performances over the years, the adjustment to McNamara was slow and painful. "To be questioned by McNamara," said one unhappy victim, "is like being picked over by bees."
Slowly, as 1961 turned the corner into 1962, the pace of questions slackened. It became apparent that McNamara hugely enjoyed not only his job, but Washington life in general. And Washington, like Detroit before it, began to recognize the different McNamaras. There was a puckish McNamara -- who, when briefed for the umpteenth time on communications and reassured that this particular phone would reach Gen. Lauris Norstad anywhere in Europe within 30 seconds, simply lifted the phone, asked for Norstad and demonstrated conclusively that when Lauris Norstad was naked, taking a shower, at home in Marnes-la -Coquette, he could not be reached in 30 seconds. There was another McNamara, one of Washington's most earnest self-improvement characters and eggheads (he was a charter member of Robert Kennedy's Hickory Hill study group); there was McNamara the cold automaton, who treated his generals "like provincial branch managers of Ford factories." There was also the McNamara who could laugh at both executives and eggheads, and enjoy being neither, as when a cherished professorial assistant struggled to close the door of his office, and McNamara strode over, closed it with a clap, then, with a twinkle and a laugh, said: "That's because I've met a payroll."
McNamara the bleak and McNamara the gay were both the same man. "He sits there at the table before a Cabinet meeting," recalls one watcher, "and he's cold business. Other Cabinet members come in, chat with each other, say hello, the way men do before a meeting begins. McNamara sits at his place, studies his papers, talks to no one. But, then, some night, there you are at a White House party, and you're supposed to be home at 2 o'clock in the morning, and who's still there twisting away? McNamara.."
Like any man of size, McNamara can be seen from many angles. The best view offered this reporter was that of a scientist, John Rubel, deputy director of Defense Research, one of the prime architects of the destruction potential that overhangs the world.
"When he came in," says Rubel, "we were infinitely troubled people. Everyone is troubled -- but we were 'troubled' troubled people. We didn't see how we could get out of some of our problems -- this endless escalation of the arms race, this needless multiplication of strategic weapons. We couldn't see how we were going to get a grip on the enormous programs we were supposed to supervise; we were worried about command control of nuclear weapons; we were worried about response. You don't know how worried we were right here in the Pentagon -- much more than the public worriers who do it out loud.
"And you know what is the most significant observation I've made since McNamara came? Just the enormous difference one man can make, the tremendous changes in practice one can bring about with no effort at all to alter the laws. All of us live, in one way or another, by reacting to our environment; he's changed the environment."
Let us see how the environment has changed; and let us follow the change by examining the key words in the logic that has shaped American power and strategy to new ends.
"Quantify" is a favorite McNamara word, which means simply "to measure." On his entry into office, McNamara found that the last Eisenhower budget had asked Congress to give the Air Force one new wing of B-52's, the super dreadnaughts of the air. But one wing of B-52's, with the tankers, missiles and ground support necessary to maintain it for 5 years, would cost $1 billion.
By McNamara's logic, such an expenditure had to be measured, "quantified," or "balanced" (another favorite word of his) against other possibilities. The Air Force already had 14 B-52 wings, 2 B-58 wings and obsolescing squadrons of B-47's. More money for the B-52's might increase our striking power by 7 percent. But the same amount of money would buy and maintain 250 Minutemen missiles or 6 Polaris submarines. Which was the best way of doing what we wanted to do? Obviously, then "quantification" required a corollary judgment, and this judgment depended on "functions" (another key McNamara word).
How did each exertion of the Army, Navy, or Air Force fit the grand function or "functions" of our strategy? For a long time, scholars (as well as soldiers) had felt that the Defense effort was distorted by separate Army, Navy, and Air Force submission of budget demands to Congress.
Most persuasive among the scholars who argued for a new approach was Charles Hitch, coauthor of "The Economics of Defense." Hitch advocated that all defense funds be allocated by function. by the purposes that animated them, not by the color of the uniform of the man who spent the money. McNamara read the book, then, immediately after he was nominated, recruited Hitch as comptroller of the Defense Department. Once installed, Hitch suggested to McNamara that they experiment by presenting a few programs to Congress as Defense requests, not Army, Air Force, or Navy requests. McNamara's reply was "No." There would be no experimental effort; instead, the entire Defense effort would be offered to Congress in terms of combined "programs" clarifying functions. Right then, and at that time.
Thus was born program packaging. And program packaging brought clarity out of confusion, making plain, for the first time, to friend and foe alike, the new direction of American strategy.
Two nuclear war program packages governed direct interchange of death with Russia: a strategic retaliatory forces program (which considered the Titan, Atlas, Polaris, Minuteman, and manned aircraft as a single family of weapons) and a complementary continental air and missile defense program (against the Russian nuclear threat).
But two conventional war programs -- one for general purpose forces and the other for complementary sealift-airlift forces -- directed attention back to the old-fashioned clash of men on battlefields.
It is significant that old-fashioned battlefield war is so much more expensive than new-fashioned nuclear war and growing more so. The nuclear war programs, now cut to $9.3 billion for 1964, can eliminate civilization from the globe and thus provide an alltime biggest bang for the buck. The conventional war programs now cost more than twice as much -- $20.5 billion in next year's proposed budget. War, by American strategy, is to be brought back to the battlefields where men can best defend the women and children of the cities.
This has been the decision and the change. The civilians who control the Pentagon now offer the White House an entirely new instrumentation of power -- and a doctrine to manage it. They now offer the President options. Since "options" is another key McNamara word that has colored all Washington thinking, we should examine what "options" means, and where the word has brought us.
"Options" means simply that civilized leadership should have at all times a variety of choices, an orchestration of form, a range of responses that will permit instant dispatch of a company to quell a southern riot, a battalion to beef up the Panama Canal defenses, a division to stabilize the Congo -- or a total commitment in a clash over Berlin.
The Pentagon still retains, as it must, the fixed contingency plans for war, which the Joint Chiefs freshen regularly (there are 228 such contingency plans, according to the latest official report).
These plans are necessary, but they no longer control American response. American power is no longer remorselessly locked in by them. McNamara's 1961 round of questions has been followed by another year of innovation. Underlying all the innovations lies the same urge to unlock, unfreeze, make flexible the retaliation of the United States to challenge. The speedup of the hard-base Minutemen program, guaranteeing and multiplying America's second-strike capacity, reduces SAC’s previously critical vulnerability -- and takes nervous fingers off nuclear triggers. The elaboration and reelaboration of signals and command communications (there is now an airborne command of SAC in the air 24 hours a day) give new assurance that SAC will not act by button response alone. Military programs run forward on 5-year plans; new procedures sensitively control, yet invite, changes in these programs.
Above all else, there is this achievement: The paper language of the laws that describe America's military leadership has finally become reality. The Army, Navy, and and Air Force are now service organizations -- they train, equip, procure, and make ready Armed Forces that they no longer command. The forces they make ready are handed over to nine great unified and specified commands, which alone operate our military machine. These commands act only at the direct order of the civilian Secretary of Defense, who is advised by uniformed Chiefs of Staff beneath him and directed by the President above him.
Every turning in American strategy has been symbolized by a mighty new command. SAC in its day spoke American doctrine clearer than words. Today, no better symbol of the McNamara-Kennedy doctrine exists than the newest of the nine great commands, the administration's favorite and its own creation: Strike Command.
It takes time for the imagination to grasp what Strike Command (Stricom) is, what it means. A visitor may stand in a frost covered meadow, at dawn, watching the sun glisten through the parachutes of 450 men as they soundlessly drop from the sky. Last night, these men were alerted 600 miles away at an Appalachian base. The two Stricom combat teams from which today's unit was drawn are always ready for exactly such no-notice alerts – on call to fly, and jump, within an hour and a half; if this were war, two full airborne divisions would follow them to the airfields where Strike's planes would be arriving to airlift them into combat. Across the country, six more divisions would, in days, be ready for air haul or sea lift. Every combat-ready element in the continental reserve -- eight divisions, three air forces, atomic artillery battalions, new transport fleets, new communications units -- would act as part of one command: Stricom.
Stricom is not only a new system of using power, it is in fact also new power. Eighteen months ago, had there been such a command, it would have found only three divisions available in the United States; now it calls on eight. Eighteen months ago, Army would have negotiated with Air Force for airlift; now Stricom commands its airlift, and that airlift has doubled, will shortly triple, in capacity. When Washington gives the word, Stricom moves -- anywhere in the world, in any strength, to cow riots or confront empires.
At MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, Stricom headquarters bubbles with the excitement of ideas in ferment. There is, for example, the ferment of rediscovery, as Army and Air Force once again find themselves joined organically in a single unified command. Gen. Paul D. Adams of the Army, a silver-haired, chunky field commander, is boss of Stricom; his deputy is Lt. Gen. Bruce Holloway of the Air Force, a tall, soft-spoken wartime ace. They work together; they enjoy it. The officers under them have blended into a new, unified staff. New field tactics, new fire patterns, new air-support doctrines rise from conversations suspended too long by bureaucratic separation. in their offices or homes. Stricom officers keep packed three kits -- one for arctic war, one for tropical war, one for temperate-zone war. When Stricom chooses the units that must move overnight to combat, it delivers also the leadership and plans to go with them.
From its roster of 11 generals and 35 colonels (all combat veterans), Stricom is prepared to peel off at once, without notice, a Task Force Alpha that commands anything up to regimental size; a Task Force Bravo that commands elements up to corps size. If more is required, Stricom can lift itself and set up a headquarters for an entire Theater of Operations, ready to receive whatever the United States can mobilize.
Stricom is the best example of what McNamara, in another key phrase, calls useful power.
"Everyone missed the point about Cuba," the Secretary reminisced recently. "It wasn't just power. It's true, a year and a half ago, we didn't have the combat-ready ground divisions, the combat consumables. We didn't have sufficient power to apply. But we also didn't have the theory of application of force, if we had had the power.
"Massive retaliation as a form of power just wasn't credible in response to a situation like the Berlin Wall, or to a situation like Vietnam, or Cuba. Massive retaliation had given us no usable power to prevent the U.S.S.R. from expanding its interests in Cuba. So we had to develop forms of usable power.
"Now, I'm not an engineer. But people who drive an automobile know almost as much about engines as an engineer -- they know what they want the engine to do. Enough people know enough about driving an automobile to determine the form and characteristics of the engine. I never had to know the characteristics of metal stress when I was at Ford. I feel I don't have to be an expert in combat leadership of troops to lay down what we need in useful power in a situation like Cuba. We have an actual difference of physical force today. We had three ready divisions in the United States in 1961 -- now we have eight combat ready divisions with their backup.
"But the application of power, how it should be applied, is even more difficult than any concern with the type or quantity of power. This was a major part of the Cuban question -- the President knew the reasons for conceiving this delicate application of power, this sophisticated use of power. But this sophistication had to come from the top of the Government. A naval commander who blockades wants to blockade -- period. He wants to stop all ships. That's his job. What complicates his decision is that the actions he takes during the blockade are also telegraphic messages to the Soviet Union, a way of signaling our intentions in a world where both sides have the military power to destroy a large part of civilization. This situation requires that the important signals come from the highest political power in the country. As a result. we've had a basic shift in the level where decisions on the application of power take place.
"At least until the world has developed a workable rule of law in international affairs, the foundation of foreign policy is power -- but it has to be usable power, controlled to serve reasonable political ends. And that's the way we're moving -- from unreason to reason."
Which is all any reasonable citizen can reasonably ask of his leadership.