The Best and the Brightest (45 page)

When McNamara entered the Administration in 1961, he had let his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, handle Vietnam, a sure sign that it was not an important issue. As the importance and complexity of Vietnam began to be evident, he took it over himself, wanting to protect the President, sure of his capacity to handle it. He then began his series of flying trips to Saigon, the on-the-spot inspections in search of the truth, a brisk, confident McNamara on the move, being televised, seeing people (the dissenters carefully screened out), gobbling up the false statistics of the day. His confidence became Washington’s confidence; the people in the capital knew that this able, driving man could handle the war, could handle the military machinery. The truth was that he had no different assumptions, that he wanted no different sources of information. For all his idealism, he was no better and perhaps in his hubris a little worse than the institution he headed. But to say this in 1963 would have been heresy, for at that point his reputation was impeccable.

He was Bob, Bob McNamara, taut, controlled, driving—climbing mountains, harnessing generals—the hair slicked down in a way that made him look like a Grant Wood subject. The look was part of the drive: a fat McNamara was as hard to imagine as an uncertain one. The glasses straight and rimless, imposing; you looked at the glasses and kept your distance. He was a man of force, moving, pushing, getting things done,
Bob got things done,
the can-do man in the can-do society, in the can-do era. No one would ever mistake Bob McNamara for a European; he was American through and through, with the American drive, the American certitude and conviction. He pushed everyone, particularly himself, to new limits, long hours, working breakfasts, early bedtimes, moderate drinking, no cocktail parties. He was always rational, always the puritan but not a prude. And certainly not a Babbitt—if he could give up an earlier preference for academe to go into business, then at least he would not be a Babbitt. He sat there behind that huge desk, austere, imposing. A Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, with a budget of $85 billion a year, not to mention a generous supply of nuclear warheads at his disposal, was likely to be imposing enough, anyway.

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, and this included almost everyone, even General Maxwell Taylor. The first time Taylor went over to see McNamara at the start of the Kennedy years, Taylor arrived a little early. He stood outside the Secretary’s office while McNamara waited for the exact moment of their appointment. When it came, Taylor was held up on the phone for a few minutes because the White House had called him. So McNamara waited for Taylor and finally Taylor waited for McNamara a bit more, and then he went in and was given one of the icier treatments of his life.

Time was of the essence, to be rationed and saved; time was not just money, it was, even more important, action, decisions, cost effectiveness, power. It became part of private Pentagon legend that if you really wanted to make a point with McNamara, the best way was to catch him on one of those long flights to Saigon or Honolulu, hours and hours aboard planes where there was nowhere else to go, no appointments waiting. There are those who remember well a scene in October 1966 when Daniel Ellsberg, who had already turned against the war, cornered McNamara on a plane, and crowding over the Secretary, served him all the dovish papers that Ellsberg had written and saved up. There was a feeling of slight amusement on the part of one witness because of the almost obsessed manner of Ellsberg, a Dostoevskyan figure, and the fact that McNamara had no place to hide.

McNamara, who was under such pressure, always tried to conceal it, to be cool, to control his emotions, though not always successfully, and there was somehow a price to be paid. He would, for instance, while he was in Detroit, grind his teeth in his sleep, wearing down the enamel until Marg McNamara realized what was happening and sent him to a dentist, who had them recapped (a New York dentist just so there would be no gossip in Detroit, gossip which might diminish his legend and thus his power; his legend was his power).

Sometimes, to those around him, he seemed so idealistic as to be innocent. He never talked about power and he did not seem to covet it. Yet the truth was quite different. He loved power and he sought it intensely, and he could be a ferocious infighter where the question of power was concerned. Nothing could come between him and a President of the United States unless it was a potential President; thus his dilemma in 1967, when he was torn between loyalty to Johnson and Robert Kennedy. For all his apparent innocence, he had triumphed in the ferocious jungle of Detroit automotive politics, he was acutely aware of how to gain and hold power. It was not, however, a quality which surfaced regularly; if anything, part of his strength appeared to be his capacity to seem indifferent, to seem almost naÏve about questions of power. One Defense Department aide who had visualized McNamara as the idealistic civil servant was stunned when he caught a glimpse of the other side of McNamara. The aide had been offered a job at the White House, and when he told McNamara about it, he was advised to refuse it because, McNamara said, though he was offered high visibility and glory, the job lacked real power. McNamara thereupon continued with a startling and brilliant analysis, department by department in the government listing, which jobs carried power in which department and why, and which jobs, seeming to have real power, in reality lacked it. He was, it seemed, a little less innocent and idealistic than the aide had thought.

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.

If the body was tense and driven, the mind was mathematical, analytical, bringing order and reason out of chaos. Always reason. And reason supported by facts, by statistics—he could prove his rationality with facts, intimidate others. He was marvelous with charts and statistics. Once, sitting at CINCPAC for eight hours watching hundreds and hundreds of slides flashed across the screen showing what was in the pipe line to Vietnam and what was already there, he finally said, after seven hours, “Stop the projector. This slide, number 869, contradicts slide 11.” Slide 11 was flashed back and he was right, they did contradict each other. Everyone was impressed, and many a little frightened. No wonder his reputation grew; others were in awe. For it was a mind that could continue to summon its own mathematical kind of sanity into bureaucratic battle, long after the others, the good liberal social scientists who had never gone beyond their original logarithms, had trailed off into the dust, though finally, when the mathematical version of sanity did not work out, when it turned out that the computer had not fed back the right answers and had underestimated those funny little far-off men in their raggedy pajamas, he would be stricken with a profound sense of failure, and he would be, at least briefly, a shattered man. But that would come later. At his height he always seemed in control; you could, said Lyndon Johnson, who once admired him and trotted him out on so many occasions, almost hear the computers clicking away. But when things went sour and Johnson felt McNamara’s doubts, his tongue, always acid for those who failed him, did not spare his prize pupil. He would say to those around him, “I forgot he had only been president of Ford for one week.” Yet even then, when his tenure as Secretary of Defense was coming to an end and he knew that his policy had failed, even then his faith in his kind of rationality did not really desert him. The war was a human waste, yes, but it was also no longer cost-effective; we were putting in more for our air power than we were getting back in damage, ten dollars of input for one dollar of damage, and the one dollar was being put up by the Soviet Union and not North Vietnam, anyway.

He was an emotional man as well, weeping at his last Pentagon ceremony, his friends at the very end worried about his health, both mental and physical, about what the war had done to his ethical framework. The Kennedy people in particular worried about him. 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.”

It would not be surprising that in the latter part of the sixties, when a sense of disillusion with Camelot grew, that the Kennedy insiders in particular wanted to spare McNamara. They were by then quite willing to write off the war and the men who made it. Mac Bundy evoked no fondness, to say the least. He had given grants to Robert Kennedy’s staff after the 1968 assassination, but there were still bitter feelings about his serving as a conduit for Johnson during the vice-presidential squabble of 1964. And Johnson was no favorite, the Kennedys had never been generous to him, nothing he did would ever please them. Max Taylor had been a favorite and there was some personal loyalty still there, but Taylor’s strict adherence to the war, right through 1968, made it difficult to salvage him. With Bob McNamara it was different, he could still go out and play house games at Hickory Hill and they wanted to spare him from the responsibility; if McNamara had been in on the planning of the big escalation in 1965, and they doubted even that, then Lyndon had somehow pushed him into it. Bob, they thought, was always a little too eager to please (though at the time these events were taking place, George Ball would grow tired of having to repeat to his liberal friends that McNamara was fooling them; he might sound dovish around Washington liberals but he was rough as hell inside those meetings, and in 1965 he was always on the other side).

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 intentions and the desire to hold and use power (most of what was good in us and what was bad in us was there; the Jeffersonian democracy become a superpower). It was always there inside his body, Bob conniving and dissembling to do good and to hold power at the same time. Later, near the end of his tour, he went to Harvard, where in another and gentler time he might have been revered, but where now he was almost captured by the radical students, a narrow escape. That night, when he was speaking to a group of professors, someone asked him about the two McNamaras, the quantifier who had given us the body count in Vietnam, and the warm philosopher of the Montreal speech, a humanistic speech which seemed to cast doubt on the nation’s—his own—defense policies. (When Johnson heard of the speech he flew into a rage, demanding to know who at the White House had cleared it, and when it turned out that it was Bill Moyers, this would speed Moyers’ own departure.) He answered: “I gave the Montreal speech because I could not survive in office without giving it, could not survive with my own conscience, and it gave me another ten months, but the price I paid for it is so high in the Congress and the White House, people who have assumed I was a peacenik all along, that if I had to do it over again, I would not give that speech.”