"Promise and Power," Deborah Shapley, part 1

Excerpts from Deborah Shapley's Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993.



From Chapter 6, "Power in the Pentagon":

[pp. 88-89; citing reasons for Robert McNamara's agreeing to leave Ford and serve as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy Administration:]

....Massive retaliation, Eisenhower's stated policy of readiness to fire off American nuclear rockets at almost any Communist affront, was highly dangerous. Influenced by former Army chief of staff General Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy argued that the United States should build up its conventional forces to have the option of large-scale non-nuclear war, or what Taylor called flexible response. Then there was the need to guard against encroaching communism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Meanwhile, Kennedy promised to revive stalled talks with the Soviets aimed at a comprehensive ban on nuclear tests. Kennedy was going to stand for strength "second to none" and arms control, too, the sword and the olive branch both.

The call to greatness and preparedness to fight required personal activism.... National leaders should not be mired in old political disputes but find solutions in a new era of consensus; [JFK] would be a president for all the people.[30]

It was this promise --- of more power doing greater good --- that drew McNamara to Kennedy like a moth to a flame. In fact, Kennedy was arousing what Henry Fairlee, the sardonic British columnist, called the politics of expectation. By making Americans expect heroic deeds on a broad scale by a president who would be more virtuous and more surrounded with excellence than normal politicians, Kennedy excited the hope and idealism forever to be associated with his name. Equally, he set the stage for overreaching, disillusion, and tragedy.
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[30] The idea of an objective consensus described in Fairlee, Kennedy Promise, runs through the sociological and political literature of the time. Examples are Bell, The End of Ideology, and Neustadt, Presidential Power.

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[p. 99]
....At first, McNamara turned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff --- the heads of each of the three services and their chairman, [Lyman] Lemnitzer. He asked them what changes needed to be made in the budget Eisenhower had left them.

The chiefs' answer proved only a rehash of requests they had submitted to [former Defense Secretary Thomas] Gates and Eisenhower and not received. McNamara said, "Do they think I'm a fool? Don't they have ideas?" [Member of the Pentagon controller's office Henry] Glass says he suggested that McNamara ask to increase the number of Polaris submarines to be produced. "What number should we ask for?" said McNamara. "Seven," said Glass. "Why seven?" McNamara asked. "That's the number [George] Mahon wants," said Glass, referring to the House Appropriations Committee's venerable chairman. The way the Pentagon had been run, Mahon's wishes were often the starting point for the Building's [Pentagon's] requests....

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[pp. 102-104]
After several appearances [by McNamara], Congress voted three times in 1961 --- and again in the next years --- to increase the defense budget. McNamara was helped by the fact that Congress was controlled by a few Democratic barons, almost all of them southerners, who believed that foreign policy and national defense should be bipartisan, lest America show weakness to the enemies of freedom in its hour of danger. So from 1961 to 1964 Kennedy and McNamara carried out the largest peacetime buildup in U.S. history and raised the budget from $41 billion to $49 billion; each year's budget was more than the combined national budgets of Great Britain, France, West Germany, and Italy at the time.[20]

....McNamara issued in March [1961] a list of questions that came to be known as the Trombones, because there were seventy-six of them. Among them were "Why does the Navy need a new class of aircraft carriers?" and "What is the basic security policy of the United States?" The chiefs and others were to make studies and provide answers to him within weeks....

It took a person of supreme drive and self-confidence to force the pace of business in the Pentagon. However well led U.S. forces had been in World War II, leadership by 1961 was starting to pass to men who had made careers advancing service interests in the internecine wars over roles and missions in the 1950s....

The dumbfounded, defensive responses of many senior military leaders only fired [McNamara] more.... By the fall of 1961, when different military factions had appealed his decisions in all 620 subcategories of the new program budget, McNamara made a point of deciding all 620 in a single day....

However, there was something about these cocky young civilians and their impatient boss that troubled many in the Building. McNamara responded to reports of dissent by publicly claiming there was no split between civilians and the military. The chiefs have been consulted more than ever before, he said. His statements were true in the narrow sense: His regular meetings in the Tank with the brass were frequent indeed. And military officers were among the Whiz Kids. But he knew, better than any of them, that he was asserting the broad legal powers of the civilian secretary vis-a-vis the armed services more forcefully than ever before. It was an early sign of his pattern of using literally true statements to mislead his audience on the real state of affairs.
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[20] Newsweek, March 12, 1962.

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[pp. 104-111]
As they took office, Kennedy and McNamara looked for ways to quickly repair the supposed missile gap. The immediate threat to U.S. forces, they knew, based on definitive work by Rand, was that American bombers -- which composed the majority of the force -- were vulnerable to surprise Soviet attack. The fastest way to fix the missile gap and deter a preemptive Soviet attack was to speed up production of the Navy's Polaris missile.

Polaris was the first twelve-hundred-mile submarine-launched ballistic missile. Sixteen of them could be carried on the new Polaris nuclear submarine, which could stay submerged for weeks in the world's oceans yet knock out Soviet cities on command from Washington. The Polaris missile program was one of the best-run and most technically successful weapons programs in the Building's history. Six Polaris submarines were on duty when John Kennedy took office. On January 30 [1961], Kennedy ordered one speedup; in a March 28 special defense message, a second acceleration, to 29 boats [sic] and 464 missiles, was announced. Later, McNamara would further increase the force to 41 submarines carrying 656 missiles....

Now a fleet of big submarines roaming the world's oceans, but staying within striking range of the Soviet Union, was physically impossible for the Soviets to find and disable in a preemptive strike. Polaris could therefore ride out a nuclear war and survive to fire back; it was invulnerable and therefore a "second strike" force. In his first weeks, McNamara heard a briefing, based on a Navy study called WSEG-50, which argued that such seagoing missiles were all the United States needed in the way of nuclear forces.[32] The WSEG-50 study computed that only 200 Polaris missiles would deter a Soviet attack for good and assure the destruction of Soviet cities and industry if war ever came.

But McNamara was also listening to men from Rand. On their advice, he agreed that the United States needed more nuclear weapons than a minimum deterrent force; it should have some long-range bombers, which, although they took twelve hours to fly to the Soviet heartland, could then hit Soviet command centers and missile sites with much greater accuracy. He also agreed that they needed some number of land-based missiles, of ICBMs, which were more accurate than submarine-launched missiles and therefore could hit small military targets Polaris could not.[33] The Air Force had been critical of Polaris; the Navy's entry into the prestigious business of fighting nuclear war threatened its monopoly. Since Kennedy had criticized massive retaliation --- the doctrine of his predecessor --- McNamara favored some ICBMs and bombers to have a flexible across-the-board force that gave more options if war came.

...Right away, McNamara and Kennedy decided to retire most of the 1,292 old B-47 bombers and the 19 old B-58s, leaving "only" 500 B-52s, to the surprise and anger of the Air Force.[34] To make the remaining bombers less vulnerable, they ordered them on permanent alert. Some were to be in the air at all times, with others able to take off on fifteen minutes' warning. McNamara often boasted of the United States' trimmer and more alert bomber force; it was a symbol of Kennedy's promise to make America strong, invulnerable, and ready to fight if the cold war turned hot. And the more the Kremlin knew about the young new administration's readiness to fight, the more likely it was to be deterred. That these steps might provoke Soviet leaders, and humiliate them by revealing the inferiority of their forces, seems not to have occurred to these whip-smart young men.

Also on Rand's recommendation, McNamara sped up production of land-based missiles, particularly the small, more accurate Minuteman. Right away, in January, McNamara doubled production of Minuteman missiles from 30 to 60 per month, the most the contractors could build. Their first budget revisions raised the small force Eisenhower planned to 600 Minutemen; by September, McNamara projected an eventual force of 1,200 Minutemen. One Air Force general told Kennedy he needed 10,000; formally the service requested 3,000.[35] McNamara's fight with the Air Force over the ultimate size of the Minuteman force became long and bitter as he moved to make missiles instead of bombers the centerpiece of the strategic forces.

Nothing told Washington faster that McNamara planned to use his legal powers as secretary to the fullest than his fight to hold the Air Force's new bomber, the B-70, in development only.[36] The B-70 was the darling of the Strategic Air Command. It was to fly at three times the speed of sound and use a new material, a titanium compound. McNamara's case against producing the B-70 was, this time at least, based on systematic analysis. A fleet of B-70s would cost $20 billion over ten years, far more than the Minuteman force, and do much of the Minuteman's mission. McNamara and Kennedy proposed limiting the B-70 to two prototypes and no production.

Powerful friends of the Air Force in Congress appropriated more for the B-70 and its reconnaissance version, the RS-70. McNamara proceeded to exercise a little-known but important power he had under the 1958 changes to the National Security Act: He refused to spend the added appropriated funds.[37]

"Uncle" Carl Vinson, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, felt Congress's prerogatives had been snubbed. He started to make a constitutional issue of the matter. But the president backed McNamara. In March 1962, Kennedy and Vinson took a walk in the White House Rose Garden and worked out a compromise that still gave McNamara his way....

The B-70 fights spanned two years and revealed McNamara's authoritarian side. He seemed disdainful of Congress and the generals who maneuvered to save their pet plane....

Thus by the summer of 1961, the senior Air Force generals were worried by McNamara; he seemed serious about invading and making decisions about what had long been their preserve. They accused him of planning to phase out bombers altogether.[38] They stirred a publicized and emotional debate over bombers versus missiles that the Air Force and McNamara would fight for the rest of his term....

The Kennedy-McNamara missile buildup was huge. At the time it was criticized mainly for being too slight.... That August [1961], Khruschev broke a long-standing moratorium on nuclear tests.[39] McNamara and Kennedy could now counter that they were strengthening America's nuclear forces, not only by slipping Polarises into the sea and adding Minutemen on land, but by reducing the vulnerability of the bomber force to Soviet attack.

In fact, much of the Kennedy-McNamara nuclear force buildup was illogical, by national lights; it was an early sign of the dangers of McNamara's instinctive preference for action over inaction. Eisenhower had left plans for a force of about 40 Atlas missiles and six Polarises at sea; in less than a year Kennedy and McNamara planned 1,900 missiles, consisting primarily of the 1,200 Minutemen and 656 Polarises. Counting the bombers, the United States would have 3,455 warheads ready to fire on the Soviet Union by 1967, according to McNamara's secret Draft Presidential Memorandum on strategic forces of September.[40]

Yet in early 1961, new SAMOS photographs and information from Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet defector, suggested that the Soviets had only 50 to 100 missiles at most. Another then-classified estimate put the real number at four.[41] By June, the Army, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the CIA were lowering current and future predictions of the Soviet force. Although Air Force intelligence continued to hold out for a likely high of 1,450 Soviet missiles by 1966, by the fall the consensus of other agencies was that an eventual Soviet ICBM force would be 850 and, more likely, 450 or fewer.

In the face of intelligence disagreement, McNamara picked a high estimate of 500 to 1,000 Soviet missiles and used it to justify the larger force he and Kennedy had planned.[42] White House advisors Jerome Wiesner and Carl Kaysen tried to convince Kennedy that with the missile gap vanishing, the U.S. force could be as low as 400 missiles or fewer. But McNamara said revealingly at a White House meeting on the matter that autumn that "a thousand Minutemen is the lowest I can go and still get it past Congress." The justification for the Minuteman buildup seems unrelated to the size of the actual threat.

...At the time, [McNamara's] planned Minuteman force stood at 1,200; the Air Force was arguing for 1,800 or more, plus the B-70 and other things. McNamara would engage in this debate from every angle until three years later, when he would lower the size of the force to just this number [i.e., 1,000 Minutemen] he planned back in 1961.......

In the excitement of the first year, there was an initial, terrible moment. On February 4 and 5, McNamara and an official party flew to the Strategic Air Command's headquarters, outside Omaha, to be briefed on the Single Integrated Operating Plan. SIOP was the operational plan the generals would execute if Kennedy --- and McNamara as second in the chain of command --- ever pushed the nuclear button. SIOP itself descended from the original SAC plan of 1951, when SAC bombers were the American strategic force and the Soviets had no striking power of their own. It was known affectionately in Omaha as the Sunday Punch.[45]

The chief of SAC was General Thomas Power, a bomber enthusiast. The plan Power showed McNamara was the one Eisenhower had approved the previous winter. It took account of Air Force intelligence's "discovery" of supposed huge numbers of Soviet missile sites the year before. These added hundreds of new targets to the list. The plan would fire as many as four weapons, sometimes more, at each target.

SIOP was also massive in its retaliation. The bomb that leveled Hiroshima in 1945 and caused its citizens ghastly destruction was a mere 20-kiloton atomic bomb. A similarly sized Russian city in the new SIOP had four bombs aimed at it: a 4.5-megaton giant and three 1.1-megaton ones in case the big bomb was a dud.

More important than the overkill, from McNamara's standpoint, was that Plan 1-A of the four presidential options called for the United States to fire a preemptive first strike at the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Sent across the Arctic on missiles and on bombers would be 3,423 nuclear weapons carrying 7,847 megatons. An estimated 285 million Russians and Chinese would be killed, and millions more in Eastern Europe. The other so-called options in the plan were no better.

...McNamara interrupted the SIOP briefer to announce that firing four weapons on a single target was wasteful; the fallout produced by such an attack would be "fantastic." Worse, citizens in the entire Communist world would become victims in such an attack, even if Eastern Europe had not lifted a finger against the United States or if China stayed uninvolved.

Among the important targets was a big Soviet air defense radar installation in Albania. General Thomas Power, trying to humor his guest, said, "Well, Mr. Secretary, I hope you don't have any friends or relations in Albania because we're just going to have to wipe it out."

McNamara glared at him. The secretary of defense was a very literal man. Firing the nuclear force was the gravest imaginable action he might have to take, and the generals who supposedly worked for him were giving him no options. It also did not comfort him to recall that Soviet doctrine called for its own massive retaliation on the United States. The Kremlin must have its version of SIOP-62 ready to fire at us, he thought.

After leaving, he gave orders to Alain Enthoven to start the arduous, strife-ridden process of forcing SAC to change SIOP so he could order something less than all-out war. It took one and a half years to draw up guidance, to reprogram weapons and communications. The revised SIOP was ready in June 1962.
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[32] WSEG-50 study contents are described by Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 258-260, and Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration, 34-38.
[33] Rand's arguments for the cost-ineffectiveness of bombers are summarized in Kaufmann, McNamara Strategy, 216, 217, 228, and Enthoven and Smith, How Much Is Enough?, 166-168.
[34] The 900 B-47s did not have intercontintental range; SAC had them based mainly overseas to be in striking range of the Soviet Union. But Rand's studies had shown definitively that they were highly vulnerable to Soviet preemptive attack, as were bombers stationed on the ground within the United States. Rand had also shown that missiles would be much more cost-effective to maintain than a large bomber force. Details on the bomber force cutbacks can be found, among other places, at Desmond Ball, Politics, 114, 118, 137.
[35] An Air Force proposal dated July 3, 1961, asked for 3,190 long-range missiles in addition to the 126 Atlas missiles already programmed, for a total of 3,316, not counting the Skybolt air-launched missile, which Kennedy had continued. The Air Force reduced its plans to a "more realistic" figure of between 1,700 and 1,900 Minutemen by the time it bargained with RSM [McNamara] in the fall. During a 1962 trip to Vanderberg Air Force Base, General Thomas Power, chief of SAC, told Kennedy and RSM that the Air Force planned to have 10,000 missiles eventually. RSM recalls that Kennedy was startled by this demand. See Desmond Ball, Politics, 244, 245. Interview, RSM.
[36] See Desmond Ball, Politics, 215-217. Kennedy was also told by science adviser Jerome B. Wiesner, Herbert York, and David Bell, director of the Bureau of the Budget, to cut back the B-70 program.
[37] Desmond Ball, Politics, 217-221.
[38] Sorensen, Kennedy, 347, 348. A discussion of the Whiz Kids' point of view is in Kaufmann, McNamara Strategy, 220-228.
[39] Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban, 77, 78, 85. An M.I.T. study in 1966 concluded that the main military reason for the Soviet resumption of tests was that the United States was producing far more nuclear delivery systems than the Soviet Union --- i.e., the Kennedy-McNamara missile buildup ordered over the previous eight months. Ibid., 84.
[40] See RSM, "Draft: Recommended Long Range Nuclear Delivery Forces, 1963-1967," September 23, 1961. This is the first of the top-secret draft presidential memoranda that RSM would send each fall to the president to justify his proposed decisions in the forthcoming budget for nuclear forces. This document summarizes the proposed bomber cutbacks and Polaris and Minuteman increases, as well as other decisions: the continuation of the Skybolt air-launched missile and the cut of the Nike-Zeus ABM, which he and Kennedy had made in eight months.
[41] See note 8 above. Interview, Raymond Garthoff.

[[dwd - Note 8 reads as follows: "In January and February 1961, the first SAMOS reconnaissance photographs were just being examined. Analysts looked for rail sidings, which were the only means for transporting Soviet missiles to launch sites. The first photos showed some tracks but so few missile sites that, in Kaplan's account, analysts were certain of only four operational Soviet ICBMs. Most classified estimates at the time pegged the number of operational Soviet ICBMs at 35, compared with the 12 Atlas and Titan missiles then in the U.S. forces. The expected Soviet advantage, or 'missile gap,' leaving America far behind was based on warnings of a crash Soviet program to build and deploy a force of 200 to 700 ICBMs by mid-1963. The Air Force was predicting the Soviets would have 1,200 by mid-1965. But in early 1961 U.S. analysts were having difficulty finding hard evidence of a crash program.

"According to Ball's reconstruction, RSM told reporters at the briefing that the evidence was inconclusive [for a missile gap] and they were still looking. This statement was entirely accurate. Conclusive evidence of the unlikelihood of a missile gap only came after April [1961], when Soviet double agent Colonel Oleg Penkovsky told the CIA that there was no crash program, that the Soviets had at most 50 to 100 missiles, and that the SS-6, the principal Soviet ICBM, was in such trouble that they were abandoning it. A good explanation is Garthoff, Intelligence Assessment and Policymaking. See also Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 295, and Desmond Ball, Politics, 90, 91."]]

[42] See RSM, "Draft: Recommended Long Range Nuclear Delivery Forces, 1963-1967," September 23, 1961. Here RSM chose to project "median" and "high" estimates of Soviet ICBMs by mid-1965 of 750 and 1,100, to justify a planned U.S. deployment of 1,200 Minutemen while retaining only a few old Atlas and Titan missiles. By September, the intelligence community, baffled by its inability to find evidence of a Soviet crash program but with some members arguing one could be under way, failed to agree on projections for the future Soviet force. See Garthoff, Intelligence Assessment and Policymaking, 16, 17, and Desmond Ball, Politics, 156-181.
[45] Interviews: RSM, Alain Enthoven, Herbert York. History and details of this SIOP, formally termed SIOP-62, are at Kaplan, Wizards, 263-272, and Martin, Strategic Thought in the Nuclear Age, 133, 139-141.