The State Department

Part Seven. (And read more about the series below this installment)

Over the course of 1964 and 1965, most of the Kennedy senior team left the administration. McGeorge Bundy gradually found dealing with Johnson too hard. Ted Sorensen, the exceptional wordsmith, could not overcome his grief over Kennedy’s death. Press secretary Pierre Salinger, resident historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the political team from Boston all moved on, to be replaced by LBJ’s choices -- Jack Valenti, Walter Jenkins, and Bill Moyers, among others.

There were changes as well among the Joint Chiefs, and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon was replaced by General Maxwell Taylor. However, one leading official, Dean Rusk, stayed on, serving until the end of Johnson’s term in 1969 – and that may have been an underestimated aspect of all that was to go wrong.

With his editors, Robert McNamara explained his view of how government worked and how that contributed to what he considered an awkward “dynamic” in the administration:

“I think the American public and cabinet officers and residents don’t understand the government. They don’t understand there’s only one – leave out the vice president – there’s only one elected official in the Executive Branch. Every other person in the Executive Branch is appointed by the president…They have no independent power base…

“I didn’t believe I had independent power. This is one of the things that affected the way I behaved as secretary, particularly during Vietnam.”

McNamara’s definition of his role was never under any circumstances to undermine the people’s choice for the nation’s highest office – yet another reason that he subsumed his views on the war into Johnson’s quest for a validating election victory in 1964 and beyond. As secretary of defense and within his own limitations, McNamara carried out his role effectively.

That was clearly not the case with Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Though McNamara was adamant that he would not criticize Rusk personally in his book, nonetheless the portrayal of Rusk that emerges is negative. (Rusk died in 1994 before the book was published and while the writing was underway.) McNamara writes, “It was not a secret that President Kennedy was deeply dissatisfied with Dean Rusk’s administration of the State Department” but did not make a change, nor did Johnson.

In October 1964, Undersecretary of State George Ball, who was singular in his opposition to the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy, sent a sixty-two-page memorandum which McNamara describes as remarkable for its “depth, breadth, and iconoclasm.” The memo was sent to Rusk, Bundy, and McNamara but did not reach Johnson, although in 1964 it probably wouldn’t have made a difference.

With his editors, and reflecting his appraisal of Rusk as ineffectual, McNamara asked rhetorically, “Where the hell was Dean? Here’s this guy who’s [under]secretary of state, saying we ought to get out and the goddamned memo didn’t even get to the president. And the view wasn’t raised. What in the hell was he doing running the State Department like that?

McNamara said that while he disagreed with Ball’s arguments, “I would have forwarded the memo to the President and said, ‘This is what…my deputy and he’s totally wrong and here’s why. But I want you to know that view exists.’ And we would have debated it…

“Now, that was Dean. And I’ve got to say this in a way that brings out the truth about Dean and yet doesn’t shaft him…Dean should have brought it to the president. And by God, if he didn’t …I should have.”

McNamara thought the Ball memo was important enough to return to it repeatedly as work on the memoir progressed. Ball’s opposition to the strategies put forward for Vietnam was the only serious high-level argument made against greater involvement. As the escalation decisions were discussed in 1965, Ball was again outspoken in opposition.

Rusk’s tenure was a reflection of Washington culture in the 1960s, which was still in the early stages of the use of leaks, asides, and rumors to demean White House staff and cabinet members. Even so, Rusk considered himself vulnerable.

McNamara was so astonished by one episode in the summer of 1967 that he included it in the book despite its personal nature:

“Dean phoned me one hot afternoon to ask if he could come to my office. I told him the secretary of state does not come to the secretary of defense’s office; it is the other way around. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘it’s a personal matter.’ I said I did not care whether it was personal or official business – I would be in his office in fifteen minutes.

“When I arrived, he pulled a bottle of whiskey out of his desk drawer, poured a drink for himself, and said, ‘I must resign.’

“ ‘You’re insane,’ I said. ‘What are you talking about?’

“He said his daughter planned to marry a black classmate at Stanford University, and he could not impose such a political burden on the president…He believed that because he was a southerner, working for a southern president, such a marriage – if he did not resign or stop it – would bring down immense criticism on both him and the president.

“When I asked him if he had talked to the president, he said no, he did not wish to burden him.

“ ‘Burden him hell!’ I said. ‘You’ll really burden him if you resign. And I know he won’t permit it. If you won’t talk to the president, I will.’ ”

Johnson’s reaction was to congratulate Rusk on the marriage. The incident showed Rusk’s personal awkwardness, which doubtless was one of the reasons his influence on Vietnam was so vexed. As McNamara told his editors, “By the closing years of the administration, Rusk lived on whiskey and aspirin.”

In 1966, when George Ball left the State Department, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach accepted a demotion to become undersecretary of state, which was recognition that the department needed better management than Rusk could provide.

At the end of the Johnson years, McNamara told his editors, while he was at the World Bank and McGeorge Bundy was at the Ford Foundation, Rusk could not find a job. “Why did [Rusk] go to the University of Georgia? Hell…because he couldn’t get accepted anywhere else.”

For all that, McNamara considered Rusk “a great American,” an especially vivid example of one of the men who served Kennedy and then Johnson to his maximum capacity and nonetheless ended with a reputation in tatters and a career culminating in failure.

Rusk and McNamara led the departments with the operational responsibility for Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy as national security adviser was the third top-tier official, but without the administrative burden of a cabinet member. Bundy filled his role in every respect but one, and that was defining – his failure to help LBJ avoid the Vietnam abyss. Bundy’s role at Harvard, his pedigree and presence made him ideal for the Kennedy team, and his standing with LBJ as a man with the coolest of trappings who showed respect for Johnson worked well for about two years.

McNamara reveals in In Retrospect that after JFK’s death he was told by Bobby that the president had intended to replace Rusk in a second term with him. “I would have urged him to appoint Mac Bundy, whose knowledge of history, international relations, and geopolitics was far greater than mine,” he writes.

Although McNamara and Bundy’s policy role in the escalation were comparable, historians and pundits have not portrayed Bundy with the degree of animus that McNamara has received. That was, in my view, because of Bundy’s generally lighter touch in all dealings with others in the administration and the media. His long tenure as president of the Ford Foundation was recognized as a paragon of progressive philanthropy.

McNamara’s years at the World Bank were disparaged as an effort at redemption.

Gordon Goldstein, the author of Lessons in Disaster, says that Bundy’s never-completed memoir would have been as full of rueful explanations as In Retrospect. Bundy seemed to understand that he had been spared ignominy. The Bundy manuscript, such as it was, may someday be released and will make that clear.

Next Week: Part Eight: Politics and Provocation.

Lyndon Johnson’s decision to withdraw from the 1968 presidential election is being portrayed as a possible precedent for President Biden’s current campaign crisis and calls for him to leave the race. A remarkably, candid audio of McNamara discussing what led to the withdrawal with his editors in 1994 is at www.platformbooks.net.

Coming: July 28 on C-Span 1 Q-A 8 pm EDT/11 pm EDT/8 pm PT. Peter Osnos dicusses “LBJ-McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail” with host Peter Slen for a full hour with audio and video of McNamara. It will be posted to C-SPAN’s website thereafter.

To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements and the audio of McNamara working with his editors on his memoir.