JFK and McNamara

Part Three

The victory of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in 1960 over Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge (who would later serve as the U.S. ambassador in South Vietnam for Kennedy) was by a narrow margin. The role played by Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago in securing a victory in Illinois that had sealed the win for John F. Kennedy was regarded with some suspicion – a reflection of the fact that when it came to political goals, the Kennedy family and their operatives knew hardball.

But as the appointments to the White House staff and the cabinet went forward leading up to the January inauguration, the choices were considered notable for their distinction and personal dignity. Dean Rusk, a former Rhodes Scholar who was president of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, was named secretary of state. Douglas Dillon, a patrician investment banker, was the new secretary of the treasury, and McGeorge Bundy, who had been named Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard at age thirty-four, was to be the national security adviser.

Robert S. McNamara had been educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Business School, and had served under General Curtis LeMay as one of the men who planned bombing raids over Japan, which were in time responsible for hundreds of thousands of Japanese dead, the majority of whom were civilians. 

In Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning documentary, The Fog of War, McNamara quoted LeMay as saying later, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” McNamara then observed, “And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

LeMay’s bombast was instinctive. As a bomb spotter in World War II, McNamara had been a technocrat.

 In the immediate postwar years, any personal reflections of McNamara’s role in the war were doubtless submerged beneath the surface as he focused on his career and the family he started with his beloved wife, Marg. After his military service he had joined the Ford Motor Company as one of the “Whiz Kids,” with a mandate to modernize the automaker, rising to the position of president of the company in late October 1960. Then, on December 8, only weeks later, McNamara was approached by Sargent Shriver, JFK’s brother-in-law, who said he was authorized to offer him the position of secretary of defense.

“This is absurd!” McNamara replied. “I’m not qualified.”

Two people had recommended McNamara to the president-elect. John Kenneth Galbraith, the famed Harvard economics professor, and Robert Lovett, a senior figure in the group of former officials who came to be known as “The Wise Men” because of their stature and national security experience. Significantly, these men had all been shaped by their experiences in World War II and the Soviet-American power clash, with the potential of a nuclear war that in the 1950s was a permanent threat. Also, there had been a communist takeover in China, followed by the war in Korea, which had ended in stalemate.

When McNamara told Kennedy that he was not qualified by experience to be secretary of defense, Kennedy replied, “Who is?” There were no schools for defense secretaries, Kennedy observed, “and no schools for presidents either.”

For all his management success at Ford and reputation for effectiveness, McNamara had this private worry:

“What do I know about the application of force and what do I know about the strategy required to defend the West against what was a generally accepted threat…[and] the force structure necessary to effectively counter the threat?”

Personal doubt as a senior government official – a recognition of limitations -- then or thereafter were not meant to be worthy of serious consideration in policy debates. Once named, a secretary of defense was assumed to be qualified.

When McNamara agreed to take the job, Kennedy immediately announced it, and the televised images were of these two vigorous men in their early forties, showing none of whatever qualms they may have had about the jobs they were assuming.

McNamara’s primary challenge, as it had been at Ford, was to oversee the management and operations of a vast infrastructure that needed to be modernized. To achieve this, McNamara had insisted as a condition of taking the job that Kennedy let him make all appointments on his own.

This led to a particular disagreement over the post of secretary of the navy. McNamara read an article in The New York Times that reported that Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was to be named to the post.

In our editorial session transcript, McNamara recalled:

McNamara: I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t realize that was [Kennedy’s] desire, and somebody leaked it and it was a done deal. I go along, couple of weeks, and I’m appointing people, and the president’s approving them all, and he says, “Bob, you are making wonderful progress, but you haven’t recommended anyone for secretary of the navy.”

I said, “Mr. President, I just can’t find the right person.”

“Well,” he said, “have you thought of Franklin Roosevelt?”

“Well,” I said, “Hell, he’s a drunken womanizer.”

And he said, “Well, have you met him?”

And I said, “No, I haven’t.”

“Well, he said, “don’t you think you ought to meet him before you make a decision?”

I said, “Sure, I’ll be happy to. Where in the hell is this guy?”

“Well, he’s a Fiat dealer.”

So, I got the Yellow Pages out, looked down. I found the Fiat place in Washington, got him there and I….

I don’t know that they ever met. Ultimately, Roosevelt was named undersecretary of commerce. McNamara’s choice for the navy position was John Connally of Texas, who had been LBJ’s campaign manager at the Democratic convention, which meant that Kennedy was well aware of him and might well have been suspicious of his loyalty. Connally got the job and served until he resigned to run for governor in 1962. (And in 1963, he was in Kennedy’s car on the day the president was killed. He was wounded himself and nearly died.) Connally later switched parties became a powerful figure in the Republican Party, and he ran, unsuccessfully, in 1980 for its presidential nomination.

McNamara: I was right on Franklin Roosevelt, and I was right on Connally. Connally was one of the loyalest people in town for Kennedy...[The president] knew he had made a deal with me. He knew he was going to lose a secretary of defense if he didn’t go along this way, and he would have…

And that’s one of the things that bonded us. You know, I loved the guy. But I had certain standards. I had certain requirements. He understood them and he knew God-damned well I was going to do them.

McNamara was using this episode as a way of framing his relationship with JFK, and the savvy management of political issues as they arose, working around the problem together rather than turning stubbornness into a damaging confrontation.

In The Fog of War, Errol Morris asked McNamara how far he would go in challenging presidential authority, the role he might have played as Vietnam moved to the center of LBJ’s years in office, and whether he might have held his ground when there were policy issues on which he and the president disagreed. This answer, repeated in various formats over the ensuing years, would be McNamara’s explanation: He was an appointed adviser to the person with the election mandate to decide.

“Morris: To what extent did you feel that you were the author of stuff, or that you were an instrument of things outside your control?

“McNamara: Well, I don’t think I felt either. I just felt that I was serving at the request of the president, who had been elected by the American people. And it was my responsibility to try to help him carry out the office as he believed was in the interest of our people.”

When it came to Vietnam, this was not a challenge for McNamara in dealing with Kennedy, as it was later to become with Lyndon Johnson. In October 1963, Kennedy and McNamara were making contingency plans to start withdrawing the 16,000 military advisers the U.S. then had in Vietnam.  It was Kennedy’s strong opinion that the war was South Vietnam’s to fight and win – and should not be America’s responsibility.

Having just returned from a survey trip to Vietnam that fall, McNamara knew that the situation there – militarily across the country and in Saigon, where the political scene was increasingly chaotic and getting worse. That reality then and thereafter was what McNamara knew to be the case – but was not what he would say in his many public opportunities to do so.

And then Kennedy was assassinated. The signoff on an American withdrawal was tabled. What JFK would have done in 1964, 1965, and beyond will never be known.

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The thousand days of the Kennedy presidency were, on the whole, a period in which the American domestic situation was, by historic standards, relatively stable. The civil rights confrontations in the South were increasing – as when Kennedy had to call out the National Guard to accompany James Meredith in 1962 as he sought to become the first Black student at the University of Mississippi.

Congressional action was stymied by the nature of the Democratic majority, which consisted of labor activists and liberals in the North and segregationists in the South, including some of the most powerful politicians of that era. The Republican Party was beginning its long-term evolution from Eastern establishment figures like Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York to conservatives like Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who was to become the party’s firebrand pro-war candidate for president in 1964.

In foreign policy, to the extent that there was a bipartisan position, it was based on developments in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The question was not whether to accept the Soviets as a great power and recognize Mao Zedong’s Communist China, but how far to go in taking them on for global influence and power. In the McCarthy period of the early 1950s, anyone who could be tainted with a hint of subversive activity or thoughts was persecuted, blacklisted, or jailed -- and that included leading State Department experts on China.

The Korean War, which had ended in a stalemate in 1953, had resulted in an unequivocal and potentially dangerous U.S. role on the peninsula. And in Europe, a divided Berlin was the proverbial flashpoint for war. When the Berlin Wall was erected in the summer of 1961, Soviet intentions were deemed hostile to the extreme. The possibility of an all-out nuclear exchange reached its apogee the following year, when Soviet missiles were placed in Cuba, putting much of the United States within range.

Two episodes in particular would shape Kennedy’s approach to dealing with Vietnam, which at the time seemed a distant and not especially urgent problem. An International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos at the end of a sixteen-nation conference in Geneva in 1962 essentially removed one of the Indochina states from the center of Cold War disputes. Settling the Laos issue was in itself not terribly significant, but it did mean that under the right circumstances, a negotiated outcome to conflict in Asia was possible.

But more prominent in Kennedy’s mind was the Bay of Pigs debacle. In April 1961, a group of Cuban exiles with CIA backing and Pentagon support were demolished just days after their invasion of the island, with the goal of wresting it away from Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government. This was a searing early lesson in failure for JFK, though it received short narrative shrift in the early pages of McNamara’s memoirs and in our discussions.

The Eisenhower administration had authorized the CIA to organize a brigade of 1,400 Cuban exiles as an invasion force to overthrow Castro, who had seized power in 1959 and had since become an avowed supporter of Soviet-style communism. The new Kennedy administration had allowed preparations for the invasion to carry on. “For three months after President Kennedy’s inauguration,” McNamara writes in In Retrospect, “we felt as though we were on a roll. But only a few days after he presented the defense blueprint to Congress, we faced a decision that showed our judgment – and our luck --- had severe limitations.”

Kennedy, McNamara writes, gathered about twenty of his advisers to a State Department meeting to make a final decision on whether to proceed. Only one person, Senator William Fulbright, dissented “vigorously.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed the plan, as did Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy. McNamara concurred as well, “although not enthusiastic.”

The invasion launched on April 17, 1961, and McNamara quotes a historian who called it “a perfect failure.” It ended in days, with the invaders killed, wounded, or captured. Watching JFK on national television taking “full responsibility” was a “bitter lesson” for McNamara:

“I had entered the Pentagon with a limited grasp of military affairs and even less grasp of covert operations. This lack of understanding, coupled with my preoccupation with other matters and my deference to the CIA on what I considered an agency operation, led me to accept the plan uncritically. I had listened to the briefings…I had even passed along to the president, without comment, an ambiguous assessment by the Joint Chiefs that the invasion would probably contribute to Castro’s overthrow even if it did not succeed right away. The truth is I did not understand the plan very well and did not know the facts. I had let myself become a passive bystander.”

When he met with Kennedy and offered to take his measure of the blame, the president said that this was unnecessary. “I did not have to do what of all you recommended,” Kennedy said. “I did it. I am responsible and I will not try to put part of the blame on you, or Eisenhower, or anyone else.”

McNamara adds: “I admired him for that, and the incident brought us closer. I made up my mind not to let him down again.”

McGeorge Bundy never completed his version of a memoir although he worked with the historian Gordon M. Goldstein in preparing one. Goldstein published his own book, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, based on their discussions and on those parts of the book Bundy had drafted before he died.

Lesson one for Bundy, Goldstein writes, grew out of the Bay of Pigs experience. That lesson was: “Counselors Advise but Presidents Decide.”

This straightforward summary explains why, after the Bay of Pigs and as American escalation in Vietnam grew through the Johnson years, the president sought advice but only he, LBJ, could make the final decisions. And Johnson’s decisions were always made with politics uppermost in his mind. Beneath the surface, and not visible to others, were his doubts and confusions about the choices he was making.

Next Week; Part Four: Early Decisions

Sources and Acknowledgements and the audio of McNamara wirking with his editors can be found at www.platformbooksllc.net