The Best and the Brightest (50 page)

Chapter Thirteen

McNamara had come in at a dead run; by the time he was sworn in he had already identified the hundred problems of the Defense Department, had groups and committees studying them. He had his people plucked from the campuses or the shadow government of the Rand Corporation and other think tanks. They were cool and lucid, these men, men of mathematical precision who had grown up in the atmosphere of the Cold War, and who were students of nuclear power and parity and deployment, men whose very professions sometimes sounded uncivilized to the humanist. He took over the Defense Department for a Chief Executive who had run on the promise of getting America moving again (one pictured them always without overcoats and hats, moving and pushing quickly through crowds, always on the move; Kennedy had once gotten angry at Robert Bird, a reporter for the
Herald Tribune,
because Bird had written that the reason that this dynamic young man was able to campaign without an overcoat in the cold of New Hampshire and Wisconsin was that he wore thermal underwear), on the assumption that we were losing our power and manhood,
they
had more missiles. McNamara had assumed that his first job when he took over would be to hurry up production and close the missile gap, but he soon discovered that there was none. Shortly after the election McNamara told Pentagon reporters this, a statement which caused a considerable flap, particularly among Republicans, who had lost an election partly because of a nonexistent gap. How many God-fearing, Russian-fearing citizens had cast their votes to end the gap and live a more secure life, only to find that they had been safe all along. When Kennedy called McNamara the next day to find out what had happened, McNamara denied that he had ended the missile gap, a denial which made the Pentagon reporters, who had heard the statement with their own ears, very leary of his word in the future.

But it was true, there was no missile gap, so instead of increasing the might of the United States and catching up with the Russians, McNamara set out to harness the might, to control it and to bring some order and rationality to it, and soon, above all, to limit the use of nuclear weapons. To control the weapons, to limit them, to rationalize their procedures absorbed his time and his energy; and Vietnam, which was a tiny little storm cloud on the horizon, seemed distant, small, manageable, far from the real center of man’s question of survival or self-destruction. It would be one of the smaller ironies of his years as Secretary of Defense that in making his arguments against nuclear weapons, forcefully, relentlessly, he had to make counterarguments
for
conventional forces, to build up those conventional forces. We had to have some kind of armed might, so he made good and effective arguments for conventional weapons (and if the Chiefs wanted to use them in Vietnam, to send American combat troops without nuclear weapons, he had to go along, since he had developed the thesis, the mystique of what conventional weapons could do with the new mobility). He gave them a rationale, for his overriding concern was quickly to limit the possibilities of nuclear war, to gain control of those weapons.

It was a very different time, the immediate post-Eisenhower years. The Chiefs, who were held over from the previous Administration (generals who believed in a more balanced posture, like Ridgway and Taylor, had been either winnowed out, or more or less ignored), were men who believed that nuclear war was a viable kind of military position; indeed, the entire American military posture was essentially based on a willingness to use nuclear weapons. That was an eerie-enough thought, and some people wanted to crawl away from it. Men such as Henry Kissinger, then of Harvard, had just made himself something of an intellectual reputation as a theoretician of tactical nuclear weapons (that is, finding something respectable between blowing up the world and being too soft), and there was thus something of a fad for tactical nuclear weapons. (Though one problem was that in the Pentagon’s war games there always seemed to be a problem with the tactical nuclear weapons. No matter which side fired first, the other side would retaliate, and every time without fail it would somehow expand to strategic weapons; whoever was behind on the little stuff would let fly with the big stuff.)

Daniel Ellsberg discussed the subject of nuclear weapons with McNamara during a luncheon meeting; later he would remember the Secretary’s passion on the subject. He was against using tactical weapons (“They’re the same thing, there’s no difference,” he said, “once you use them, you use everything else. You can’t keep them limited. You’ll destroy Europe, everything”). Ellsberg had heard that McNamara was a man without convictions or emotions, but decided that this was a deliberately chosen pose, and an effective one, to cover real feelings. It was, he thought, an impressive performance, not just because of McNamara’s almost emotional abhorrence of the weapons but because he understood the dangers of his situation: he had to keep his feelings hidden, for if the Chiefs or Congress found out how he felt he would be finished as Secretary of Defense. The whole might of America was concentrated on nuclear weapons, and we had sold the idea of nuclear retaliation to the Europeans; if the word got out of the Secretary’s negative attitude, it would mean that the United States was virtually disarmed, so of course he would not be able to stay in office.

Shortly after lunch Ellsberg received a call from Adam Yarmolinsky, who had been present during the meeting. “You must not speak of this lunch to anyone. It is of the highest importance. Not to anyone. It must not get around.” Ellsberg agreed, and then mentioned a rumor that the President himself felt the same way about the weapons. (There was a story going around hip Pentagon circles that Kennedy was unreliable, almost soft on nukes; he had been taken to visit a SAC base, and when he saw a 20-megaton bomb, he blanched visibly. “Why do we need one of these?” he asked. It caused a scandal in SAC circles because this, of course, was the standard bomb, they were all like this.) “There is no difference between them at all,” Yarmolinsky answered.

McNamara worked hard to change Western thinking about nuclear policy. He set out to educate not just the Pentagon but his European colleagues as well, forming the Nuclear Planning Group for his European counterparts, men who were politicians first, not managers, and thus felt themselves particularly dependent on their generals. He forced them to build a table where only the defense ministers could sit. No prepared papers or set speeches were allowed, and they could not turn to their generals who then turned to their colonels. They came to the meetings, only one person from each country at the table, only four others allowed in the room, he hated crowds. At first it did not work too well because McNamara overwhelmed them, he was too strong a presence, but gradually he forced them to take political responsibility for defense positions, and equally important, build skilled professional staffs which could challenge the technical thinking of the military at the lower levels, point by point, so they would not be forced into blind choices at the highest level.

He worked hard to bring greater control to the entire nuclear system. When he entered office he had found it surprisingly hair-trigger and chancy. The military had constructed a system in which the prime consideration was not control but getting the weapons into the air, no matter what; controls and safeguards were secondary. Even on the weapons themselves the safety features seemed marginal; there was, he decided, far too great a chance that one could go off in a crash, and he insisted on other safety features being added. He evolved PAL (Permissive Action Link), a system which was developed first as a technical device to lock up all nuclear weapons not under U.S. control; that is, the nukes in other countries. With that in mind he got development of it, his rationale being: I love nuclear weapons as much as the next man, but if we let these Greeks and Turks have them . . . Technically, none of the nuclear weapons here in the United States could be used without a specific order from the President; in practice, if the Chiefs felt that communications had failed, they could make a decision to use the weapons based on their best judgment. It was a very subtle thing; once he got started with the rationale of keeping them from the non-Anglo-Saxon peoples of NATO, he was able eventually to slip the controls on American weapons. Had the military been exactly sure of his intentions—they sensed them, of course—they might have blocked him from the start. At the end they fought and fought hard. After all, it downgraded the field commander, and to them, the threat that the reaction time was slowed down was greater than that a crackpot might take over the base.

He felt himself very much alone, surrounded by hostile forces in his quest. He had no following on the Hill and he felt that his detractors did, so his loyalty to the President, which was strong in any case, was doubly strong, the President was his only patron and protector, and his source of power. But if the President had doubts about him, then he lost power in this savage world in which he was operating. He was already a compromised figure. He was fighting for the highest needs of mankind, plotting against the bureaucracy, dissembling inside, but eventually the compromises that he made did not really work out satisfactorily, he had to give so much in order to appear respectable. To a degree the fault lay in the era. The nation was beginning to emerge from a period of enormous political and intellectual rigidity (it had virtually been embalmed) because of the Cold War, a period which nonetheless had seen a great jump in the technological might of the United States. The growth of the sophistication of weapons and the enormous increase in their price had given the Pentagon a quantum jump in power. Its relationship with the Congress, always strong, but based in the past largely on patriotism and relatively minor pork-barrel measures, was now strengthened by a new loyalty, based on immense defense contracts conveniently placed around the homes of the most powerful committee chairmen.

On how many fronts could he fight? If he had tried to turn the country around on chemical and biological warfare, for instance, Senator Russell surely would have opened hearings. Did you want a fight on everything? By holding them off on the B-70, a bomber which no one needed, he almost brought on a constitutional crisis, with the Congress passing the money that the executive branch did not want to spend. He was constantly fighting with the Chiefs, but also deciding how much each point was worth. On the test-ban treaty McNamara virtually locked them in a room for a week to fight it out with them. He made them promise that once he had broken an argument they could not go back to it, because he felt that arguing with the Chiefs was a lot like arguing with your mother-in-law; you win a point and go on to the next only to find that they are back at the first. So, for a week, hour after hour, he went through every objection they had, breaking them down point by point, until finally he won. He read his victory as a conversion. His aides felt differently, however; they felt he had shown how important the treaty was to him, and as one said later, it was virtually a case of going along with him or resigning. But how many issues were worth this much effort, particularly since many of these fights were not his by tradition? It should have been the Secretary of State, not of Defense, who was fighting for a nuclear-test ban.

Yet he took over at a time when the world was changing. The threats of the Soviet Union were not the same. There was no longer a Communist monolith. (The Chiefs, for instance, were far slower to accept the Sino-Soviet split than most people in Washington, believing it finally when the Russians massed troops on the Chinese border.) The bureaucracy around him often seemed more rigid than the needs of the world required. More missiles for NATO. More troops. Bigger bombers. It was as if at a crucial moment in history he sensed the problems and the end of certain myths and worked hard to correct them, yet as if finally it was all too much. His record clouded even on nuclear weapons. Had they tempered the arms race as they might have or had they helped push the Soviets into another round of mutual escalation of missile building?

He compiled an awesome record in Washington in those days. He was a much-sought-after figure, a man of impressive qualities. In a flashy Administration which placed great emphasis on style, McNamara was at home. He had always liked style among people at Ford, judging them not only by what they said, but how they said it. He was popular at dinner parties and was considered unusual in that he did not bore women at dinner by talking about nuclear warheads. He was a friend of Jack and Jackie’s, of Bobby and Ethel’s, and yet he lived simply, driving his own car more often than not, a beat-up old Ford. He was gay when the occasion called for gaiety, sober when it called for sobriety. If he made enemies on the Hill, they were at least the right enemies—Vinson, Stennis, Rivers—men hardly revered by social-intellectual Washington. His congressional appearances were impressive, well prepared, grim and humorless. McNamara testifying on the Hill was not someone you wanted to cross. Yet he was unbending, he knew too many answers. The Hill didn’t like that. He was perhaps a little too
smart,
and when Southerners say someone is smart they are not necessarily being complimentary. His deputy Roswell Gilpatric cautioned him, suggesting that it would be a good idea to go over and have a few drinks occasionally, get to know the boys, humanize yourself and your intentions. The oil in the wheels of government was bourbon. But McNamara would have none of it. He worked a fourteen-hour day already; if he did his job and presented his facts accurately and intelligently, then they would do their job by accepting his accuracy and there was no need to waste time in missionary work. He had his responsibilities and they theirs, and if they could not see the rightness of what he was doing, he did not think he could woo them by drinking. Probably he was right.