Excerpted from Deborah Shapley's Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993.
From Chapter 7, "Cold Warrior Stepping Up"
[pp. 128-130]
From Chapter 7, "Cold Warrior Stepping Up"
[pp. 128-130]
Few events showed McNamara's growing confidence and power around town that year [1961] more than the affair of General Walker.... From his new post as a spokesman for the Western world, McNamara found it alarming how many senior officers gave speeches with political content, often violently anti-Communist in tone....
Conflict was drawn right away when, in early 1961, a speech to be given by the famous World War II admiral Arleigh Burke was hacked away by a reviewer, infuriating Burke. The speech had had so much political content that Arthur Sylvester, McNamara's press aide, had scrawled at the top of it, "This is a speech that should be made only by the secretary of state." In response Burke called Sylvester a "son-of-a-bitch."[44]
The issue flared up again in April, when Overseas Weekly, a tabloid published for troops in Germany, carried a long article about the activities of Major General Edwin Walker, who had been giving "political seminars" modeled on the Birchites' program [the program of the John Birch Society]. Walker saw the broad mass of Americans as dangerously pro-Communist.... He also accused McNamara's special assistant, Adam Yarmolinsky, of being a Communist dupe.[45]
Kennedy called McNamara and told him to investigate what Walker was doing. When, three days later, McNamara had no answer, Kennedy was "on McNamara's back for his failure to produce," says Sylvester. McNamara ordered Sylvester to find Walker in Germany, however he could. Walker's defense of his statements to Sylvester showed him to be on the fringe --- although clearly many people shared his beliefs.
There followed a highly publicized crackdown. McNamara, with typical zeal, had many officers' speeches reviewed by an internal committee. The allies of General Walker, the irate Admiral Burke, and Strom Thurmond in the Senate screamed that McNamara was "muzzling" the military. Then Senator John Stennis of Mississippi opened an investigation. The senators demanded all copies of speeches submitted and each edited version. The pile consisted of thousands of documents, which McNamara decided to give to the committee within twenty-four hours of the senators' request. His assistant for legislative affairs rode the Pentagon corridors on a bicycle to get them together in time.
Next the senators wanted to know the names of the reviewers, as well as which reviewer had edited which speech. McNamara was adamant that only he was responsible; he yielded the reviewers' names but would go no further. Kennedy backed McNamara: The principle of civilian control was at stake, along with the president's desire to control his own foreign policy.
At a highly orchestrated confrontation, Stennis demanded the information, and McNamara drew from his pocket a signed order from Kennedy invoking executive privilege. Stennis, a former judge, briefly traced the separation of powers under the Constitution and sustained the executive plea.[46]
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[44] Arthur Sylvester, Oral History, JFKL, August 2, 1977, pp. 26, 27.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[45] Trewhitt, McNamara, 90-92.
[46] Ibid. The confrontation took place on February 8, 1962.
From Chapter 8, "Statistician Against Communism"
[pp. 139-141]
In his first, formative weeks in office, McNamara agreed to be briefed by William Weed Kaufmann, a respected young man, who in 1956 followed Bernard Brodie, the godfather of the nuclear strategists, to Rand.... [The first such briefing was] on February 10, 1961.[2]
Five days earlier, McNamara had been briefed by the generals at Strategic Air Command headquarters outside Omaha on SIOP, the operational nuclear war plan. His alarm bells were going off about what would happen if he ever had to exercise his responsibility, as number two in the chain of command... and press the nuclear button....
Kaufmann showed McNamara a detailed strategy for limited nuclear war. He argued that if the Soviets launched a big conventional attack on Europe or a nuclear attack on the United States, the U.S. military could hit back not with the entire nuclear force, as SAC planned, but only with nuclear strikes against Soviet military forces, airstrips, and missile sites away from cities. The United States would announce it was withholding part of its nuclear force to use against Soviet cities if the Soviets did not let up after the first round. The plan, called counterforce-no cities, clearly derived from the theories of bargaining and escalation, which economists and mathematicians at Rand and elsewhere had developed in the previous decade. For in Kaufmann's scenario, it was not the actual destruction of Soviet forces, which he assumed Moscow would understand to be only a limited attack, so much as the threat of imminent destruction of Moscow and Leningrad and the prospect of many more millions of citizens dead that should make Soviet leaders yield.
The plan could lower the destructiveness of nuclear war and proposed a way to end such a war.[3] And, if U.S. leaders announced they were adopting a counterforce strategy and pointed out how many Soviet lives would be spared by initially declaring cities out-of-bounds, the Kremlin might just be induced to adopt a similar strategy.
Thus the first exchange of nuclear weapons could be limited by the mutual interest of both parties in avoiding their own destruction. A further advantage was that once the United States announced this relatively more feasible way of waging a nuclear war, then its threat to use nuclear weapons would be more credible than it was under the massive retaliation doctrine the Kennedy administration had inherited from Eisenhower and [John Foster] Dulles.
Kaufmann had been working on the idea since about 1958 at Rand and had vetted it in front of "murder boards" of fellow analysts. Rand's sponsor, the [US] Air Force, got wind of the concept. Certain Air Force generals were appalled by massive retaliation and liked Kaufmann's alternative.[4] A longstanding doctrine of air power said that bombing should be selective and aim at annihilating the enemy's military forces and not civilians; U.S. air generals had fought their British colleagues on this point when the Royal Air Force set out to bomb Dresden and Hamburg in World War II. SAC's all-out nuclear Sunday Punch ran contrary to this humane tradition.
...Counterforce-no cities became the basis for the changes in SIOP, the operational war plan for U.S. strategic forces, that McNamara ordered Alain Enthoven to begin working on in the wake of the terrible briefing near Omaha.[6] It also become the basis for the first five-year plan for nuclear forces, issued in late February. McNamara's first Draft Presidential Memorandum on strategic nuclear forces, written as guidance for the next budget and dated September 23, 1961, said:
[I]n the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, [U.S.] strategic forces would first...
strike back against Soviet bomber bases, missile sites, and other installations
with long-range nuclear forces, in order to reduce Soviet power and limit the
damage that can be done to us by vulnerable Soviet follow-on forces, while,
second, holding in protected reserve forces capable of destroying the Soviet
urban society, if necessary, in a controlled and deliberate way.[7]
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[2] Interview, William Kaufmann; profile of Kaufmann is at Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 191-203.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[3] Many retrospective accounts of the war gamers of Rand during the 1950s stress the analysts' flip treatment of nuclear war fighting. However, some of those analysts, such as Kaufmann and Alain Enthoven, believed they were making the world safer by finding ways to lower the destruction in the next war, which they, like most people at the time, thought would be nuclear. The Rand men knew, at least generally, of SAC's plans to fight this war with an all-out, probably preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and China. They were devising rationales to move away from this dangerous scenario. From a vast literature, see Weigley, The American Way of War, chap. 17, and Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, chap. 14.
[4] Interviews: William Kaufmann, Frank Trinkl; Kaplan, Wizards, 260-262.
[6] The changes are described in Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill," 64-69. The details of the Sunday Punch war plans and their successor are still not public. See Kaplan, Wizards, 276-279.[7] RSM, "Draft: Recommended Long Range Delivery Forces, 1963-1967," September 23, 1961, p. 4.
From Chapter 9, "Battling Chaos"
[pp. 176-178]
[On Wednesday, 24 October 1962, the naval "quarantine" of Cuba during the missile crisis took effect.] That evening in the Building, [McNamara] decided he was not being well informed. [Roswell] Gilpatric...says he and McNamara weren't being "told anything. We were just being assured that this overall type of action was being implemented, and the Navy would take care of everything." This fit with the demeanor of Admiral George W. Anderson, the tall, blue-eyed, imposing chief of naval operations, who, when Kennedy ordered the quarantine, had said, "Mr. President, the Navy won't let you down." But when the operation began, says Gilpatric, "we just weren't sure they were operating on the basis of the very latest information. They'd run off a position at 1800 hours [6 PM] and operate on that for the next six or eight or twelve hours rather than constantly...adjusting.[25]
So at ten o'clock Wednesday night, McNamara took Gilpatric and marched up to Flag Plot, the Navy's command center.[26] This was a secure room under constant Marine guard. The walls were covered with huge charts of the seven seas, with markers showing the whereabouts of each ship. About thirty men were in the room.
The two civilians began questioning the duty officer. Admiral Anderson entered.
McNamara spotted a marker that showed a U.S. ship off in the ocean by itself, far from the quarantine line. "What's it doing there?" he asked. Anderson later said he did not reply because too many people within earshot were not cleared for this information. Anderson suggested they talk in an adjoining office, which was more secure. There he explained that the ship was tracking a Soviet submarine.
McNamara began interrogating Anderson. What was the Navy's plan for the first interception [of a Soviet vessel]? Anderson replied that there was no need to discuss it. This was the Navy's operation.
We must discuss it, McNamara retorted. He began lecturing Anderson that the object was not to shoot anybody but to communicate a political message to Khrushchev. The operation must be run to avoid humiliating the Russians, if at all possible, otherwise Khrushchev might start a war.
What were the captains going to do if a ship started through the line? Shoot across its bow? What if it kept going? Shoot at the rudder? What then? What were Anderson's orders to his captains? McNamara demanded. Did each ship have a Russian-speaking officer on board?
Never before had a secretary of defense so cross-examined a member of the Joint Chiefs. Both men were under strain. McNamara was getting emotional. Anderson was red-faced and determined not to lose self-control. Some accounts say Andersons accused McNamara of "undue interference" in naval matters.
Anderson picked up a copy of the Navy regulations manual and waved it at McNamara. "It's all in there," he said.
McNamara answered, "I don't give a damn what John Paul Jones would have done. I want to know what you are going to do, now."
Anderson said, "Now, Mr. Secretary, if you and your deputy will go back to your offices, the Navy will run the blockade."
It was a critical moment in the growing strain and mistrust between McNamara and his senior commanders. Anderson and other Navy men were already convinced that McNamara was a "liar" in his dealings with them, and not the sterling figure he was portrayed as by admirers in the press. Now the civilian had physically intruded on the sanctum of Flag Plot and cross-examined Anderson. Years later, however, the admiral insisted that their exchange had been polite and McNamara's questions legitimate. He had not accused McNamara of "undue interference," he said.[27]
McNamara's invasion of Flag Plot became part of the lore of the [Pentagon] Building, a landmark in the annals of civilian control. Even without the later civilian micromanagement of Vietnam, the Flag Plot episode would mark McNamara as the most heavy-handed civilian boss in the military's long and unforgiving memory since Truman fired Douglas MacArthur.
The real issue was whether McNamara's confrontation had been necessary to prevent a shooting war in the Caribbean, where American subs were now chasing Soviet subs, and Soviet and American surface ships maneuvered dangerously close to one another. Gilpatric says that half an hour after they returned to McNamara's office that night, an emissary from Anderson appeared. The officer asked for a list of McNamara's questions and concerns in detail. "From that point on they were submitting, asking approvals," Gilpatric says.
Gilpatric also recalls that as they marched back from Flag Plot through the long corridors, McNamara muttered: "That's the end of Anderson...he won't be reappointed, and we've got to find a replacement for him. As far as I'm concerned, he's lost my confidence."[28]
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[25] Roswell Gilpatric, Oral History, JFKL, May 27, 1960 [sic], pp. 59ff.
[26] Abel, Missile Crisis, 154-156; interviews: George Anderson, Roswell Gilpatric, RSM.
[27] Interviews: George Anderson and senior naval officers.
[28] Roswell Gilpatric, Oral History, JFKL, May 27, 1960, p. 61.
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[pp. 182-183]
...After the [Cuban Missile] crisis [JFK] held a pro forma meeting to congratulate [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] on their performance. Partway through the meeting, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay spoke up and said, Mr. President, we failed.[39]
Kennedy was startled. Failed? How?
Castro's still in power. We should have gotten rid of Castro and we failed to do that, said LeMay, in dead earnest.
Kennedy decided he could not work with some of the chiefs. The use of force for limited political ends was just not understood in certain military quarters.
Kennedy and McNamara apparently both wanted to get rid of LeMay and Anderson when their terms expired in 1963. But they couldn't do so without serious political repercussions. They reappointed LeMay for a second term, through January 1965, and decided not to reappoint Anderson. Gilpatric and Navy Secretary Fred Korth were sent to Anderson's grand office to inform him. Kennedy offered to make him ambassador to Portugal. Anderson first was furious, then accepted. Gilpatric notes that Anderson did a very good job in Portugal.
The rumor in the Navy, however, was that it was McNamara who insisted on the ambassadorship, because he couldn't stand to have Anderson anywhere in North America.[40]
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[39] Background interview.
[40] Interview, Frank Gard Jamieson.
