The Quiz Kids rebranded themselves as the "Whiz Kids". [113] To mobilize the Reserves and National Guards would mean having to call up hundreds of thousands of men from civilian life, which would inevitably disrupt the economy, which in turn would require ending the peacetime economy and putting the economy on a war footing. McNamara) were not letting "professional military experts" win the war. [195] Henry McPherson, an aide to the president, recalled the scene: "He reeled off the familiar statistics-how we had dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on all of Europe during World War II. Secretary of State John Kerry once said of him, "A sense of . The U.S. nuclear policy remained the same. [94] In 1995, McNamara met with former North Vietnam Defense Minister V Nguyn Gip, who told his American counterpart that the August 4 attack never happened, a conclusion McNamara eventually came to accept. He then attended Harvard Business School, where he earned an M.B.A. in 1939. [166] Starting in 1968, the British began expelling the native Chagossians from Diego Garcia, with the process completed by 1973. Rusk entered into duty as Secretary on January 21, 1961, and resigned on January 20, 1969. [112] Bundy argued that it was the responsibility of the South Vietnamese government to stop the VC and that if the Americans continued to do all the fighting, then the United States would lack the necessary leverage to pressure Saigon into making reforms, turning "the conflict into a white man's war, with the United States in the shoes of the French". [155], In July 1961, McNamara was informed by the British Defence Minister, Peter Thorneycroft, that the financial burden of trying to maintain British forces around the world was too much, and that the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was considering a withdrawal of all British forces "East of Suez" to end the British military presence in Asia. [137] As McNamara continued to insult the crowd and the mood grew more ugly, he fled into Quincy House, from which he escaped via underground tunnels to see Kissinger. Columbia Point Boston MA 02125 (617) 514-1600. [199] Poverty also came to be redefined as a condition faced by people rather than countries. [176] McNamara went on to say that the bombing raids had not damaged the North Vietnamese economy which was "agrarian and simple" and the North Vietnamese people were unfamiliar with "the modern comforts and conveniences that most of us in the Western world take for granted". Conversely, his actions in mandating a premature across-the-board adoption of the untested M16 rifle proved catastrophic when the weapons began to fail in combat, though later congressional investigations revealed the causes of these failures as negligence and borderline sabotage on behalf of the Army ordnance corps' officers. When Kennedy received confirmation of the placement of offensive Soviet missiles in Cuba, he immediately set up the 'Executive Committee', referred to as 'ExComm'. These moves were significant because McNamara was abandoning President Dwight D. Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation in favor of a flexible response strategy that relied on increased U.S. capacity to conduct limited, non-nuclear warfare. [102] McNamara's hawkish stance on Vietnam was well known in Washington and many in the press often referred to the war as "McNamara's war" as he was the one in the cabinet always pressing for greater American involvement. He was a strong proponent of the blockade option over a missile strike and helped persuade the Joint Chiefs of Staff to agree with the blockade option. [59] In late 1962, McNamara ordered planning to withdraw the American advisers from South Vietnam in 1964 as according to Pentagon calculations the war should be won by then. [119] On 7 November 1965, McNamara sent Johnson a memo saying that the "substantial loss of American lives" in Vietnam was worth the sacrifice in order to contain China, which McNamara called the world's most dangerous nation. [86] Fearful of causing a war with China, Johnson was opposed to the plans of Khnh to invade North Vietnam, and he was even less enthusiastic about having the United States invade North Vietnam. Others give a different view of McNamara's departure from office. [140] McNamara's doubts were encouraged by his civilian aides such as Leslie H. Gelb and John McNaughton, who complained that their wives and teenage children were chiding them as "war criminals" when they came home from work. Rusk responded, "Does that include those who are buried here?" DeGaulle did not respond. [185] However, despite seeing the March on the Pentagon demonstrators as a sign of social decay, his characteristic competitive spirit came to the fore as he argued that if he had been leading the March on the Pentagon, he would have taken over the Pentagon and shut it down, saying hippies lacked the necessary discipline and intelligence. [120] General William Peers wrote critically of the "body count" strategy, stating: "with improper leadership, 'body count' could create competition between units, particularly if these statistics were compared like baseball standings and there were no stringent requirements as to how and by whom the counts were to be made". I've already made my decision". [57] McNamara's "quantitative" style based upon much number-crunching by computers about trends in Vietnam missed the human dimension. [119], The casualty lists mounted as the number of troops and the intensity of fighting escalated. [85] The advice that McNamara and other American officials gave to the South Vietnamese to make reforms to crack down on corruption and make the government more effective was always ignored as by this point the South Vietnamese government knew very well that the Americans, having repeatedly promised in public that they would never permit the "loss" of South Vietnam, were now prisoners of their own rhetoric. [89] Captain John J. Herrick of the Maddox reported that the "torpedo boats" were almost certainly just radar "blips" caused by the "freak weather effects" of the storm and the reports of an attack on his ship were due to an "overeager" radar operator who mistook the motors of the ship for the rush of torpedoes. John F. Kennedy chose Dean Rusk to be his Secretary of State, convinced that Rusk would not challenge presidential control of foreign policy. After retiring, he served as a trustee of several organizations, including the California Institute of Technology and the Brookings Institution. He was a member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity,[10] was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his sophomore year, and earned a varsity letter in crew. Robert Strange McNamara ( / mknmr /; June 9, 1916 - July 6, 2009) was an American business executive and the eighth United States secretary of defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. [80] McNamara always ended his speeches by shouting out what he thought was a phrase meaning "Long live a free Vietnam! [144] The task was assigned to Gelb and six officials whom McNamara instructed to examine just how and why the United States became involved in Vietnam, by answering his list of 100 questions starting with American relations with the Viet Minh in World War II. [29] The DPMs were also disliked because the systems analysis process was so heavyweight that it was impossible for any service to effectively challenge its conclusions. In response to McNamara's claim that the Joint Chiefs supported him, he proposed that the Joint Chiefs all resign in protest at McNamara's leadership. The Navy version was drastically overweight and difficult to land, and eventually canceled after a Grumman study showed it was incapable of matching the abilities of the newly revealed Soviet MiG-23 and MiG-25 aircraft. Three years later, he was appointed assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. [143] The economic sacrifices could only be justified to the American people by saying the war would be brought to a victorious conclusion. [citation needed], One major hallmark of McNamara's cost reductions was the consolidation of programs from different services, most visibly in aircraft acquisition, believing that the redundancy created waste and unnecessary spending. On November 9, 1960, McNamara became the first president of Ford Motor Company from outside the Ford family since John S. Gray in 1906. [130][not specific enough to verify], As a Christmas gesture, Johnson ordered a bombing pause over North Vietnam and went off to his ranch in Texas for the holidays. [38], Due to the nuclear arms race, the Vietnam War buildup and other projects, Total Obligational Authority (TOA) increased greatly during the McNamara years. [65] In March 1963, Vann resigned from the Army as he was informed that his career was over. "McNamara's failures and ours: Vietnam's unlearned lessons: A review ", This page was last edited on 24 July 2023, at 20:33. He traveled to South Vietnam many times to study the situation firsthand and became increasingly reluctant to approve the large force increments requested by the military commanders. JFK's Assassination. [92] Records from the Lyndon Johnson Library have indicated that McNamara may have misled Johnson on the purported attack on a U.S. Navy destroyer by allegedly withholding recommendations from US Pacific Commanders against executing airstrikes. [190], McNamara left office on February 29, 1968; for his efforts, the President awarded him both the Medal of Freedom[191] and the Distinguished Service Medal. [104] After hearing of the attack, Johnson assembled his national security team together with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, John W. McCormack, and the Senate Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield, to announce "I've had enough of this". The end effect was to remove the Intelligence function from the control of the military and to put it under the control of the Secretary of Defense. As the 51st U.S. Secretary of State, he set the foreign policy of the Harry S. Truman administration from 1949 to 1953. [135], In November 1966, McNamara visited Harvard University and the car driving him to see Henry Kissinger was surrounded by anti-war protesters who forced the automobile to stop[136] The students refused to let the car move until McNamara debated their leader, Michael Ansara, the president of the Harvard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. [90] McNamara, via Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp Jr. of the Pacific fleet, put strong pressure on Herrick to say that his ship had been attacked by torpedo boats, despite his strong doubts on he. [212], McNamara maintained his involvement in politics in his later years, delivering statements critical of the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq. As McNamara said in his 1962 annual report, "The military tactics are those of the sniper, the ambush, and the raid. The annual FYDP was a series of tables projecting forces for eight years and costs and manpower for five years in mission-oriented, rather than individual service, programs. [172], Senator John C. Stennis was a conservative Southern Democrat who enjoyed much influence as a senior member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. Then his voice broke, and there were tears on his eyes as he spoke of the futility, the crushing futility of the air war. The crossword clue JFK's secretary of state with 4 letters was last seen on the January 01, 2009. That was hard to mend". [47] At one point, the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised sending 60,000 U.S. troops into Laos. He grew up in comfort. In return, he faced a "firestorm of scorn" at that time. He applied metrics (body counts) to determine how close to success his plan was. McNamara did not agree with this approach. While the directive was passed in 1963, it was not until 1967 that the first non-military establishment was declared off-limits. He was equally determined about other cost-saving measures. I was more courteous then, and I hope I'm more courteous today!". Fiscal year TOA increased from $48.4 billion in 1962 (equal to $337billion in 2021) to $49.5 ($329) billion in 1965 (before the major Vietnam increases) to $74.9 ($452) billion in 1968, McNamara's last year in office (though he left office in February). [46] Rusk shot down that proposal, saying his World War II experiences in Burma had taught him that bombing was ineffective in the jungles and six planes were not enough. [210] Despite his role as one of the architects of Operation Rolling Thunder, McNamara met with a surprisingly warm reception, even from those who survived the bombing raids, and was often asked to autograph pirate editions of In Retrospect which had been illegally translated and published in Vietnam. The son Robert Craig McNamara, who as a student objected to the Vietnam War, is now a walnut and grape farmer in California. [50] On 29 September 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated to McNamara that if Chinese forces entered Laos, then the SEATO forces would need at least 15 divisions consisting of some 278, 000 men to stop them. [58], In 1962, McNamara supported a plan for mass spraying of the rice fields with herbicides in the Phu Yen mountains to starve the Viet Cong out, a plan that was only stopped when W. Averell Harriman pointed out to Kennedy that the ensuing famine would kill thousands of innocent people. "[199] McNamara negotiated, with the conflicting countries represented on the Board, a growth in funds to channel credits for development, in the form of health, food, and education projects. [76] On 19 December 1963, McNamara reported the situation was "very disturbing" as the "current trends, unless reversed in the next two or three months, will lead to neutralization at best or more likely to a Communist-controlled state". President John F. Kennedy Meets with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara Accession Number AR6289-A Date (s) of Materials 23 January 1961 Description President John F. Kennedy meets with Secretaries of State and Defense. [35] During the final review of both alternatives on Sunday, October 21, upon Kennedy's request, McNamara presented the argument against the attack and for the quarantine. [76] Though McNamara admitted that the new regime was "indecisive and drifting", he advised Johnson to undertake "more forceful moves if the situation does not show early signs of improvement". [176] McNamara also stated that North Vietnamese morale was not broken by the bombing offensive as the North Vietnamese people were "accustomed to discipline and are no strangers to deprivation and death" while everything indicated the leadership in Hanoi were not affected by the bombing raids. [103] McNamara stated that North Vietnam was a backward Third World country that did not have the same advanced industrial infrastructure of First World nations, making the bombing offensive useless. [179] Stennis, an ardent white supremacist who had fiercely opposed Johnson's civil rights legislation, was an old enemy of Johnson's, which led the president to decide not to sack McNamara in August 1967 as that would be seen as a victory by Stennis, and instead to wait a few months to fire him. [93] McNamara was also instrumental in presenting the event to Congress and the public as justification for escalation of the war against the communists. Thornton had seen an article in Life magazine portraying Ford as being in dire need of reform. [54], In October 1961, when General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Whitman Rostow advised sending 8,000 American combat troops to South Vietnam, McNamara rejected that recommendation as inadequate, stating that 8,000 troops would "probably not tip the scales decisively", instead recommending to Kennedy that he send 6 divisions to South Vietnam. [147] Gelb recalled that he presented the Papers to McNamara early that year, but McNamara did not read them then,[146] and Gelb did not know as late as 2018 if McNamara ever did. McNamara later concluded that counterforce was not likely to control escalation but to provoke retaliation. This was endorsed in a Joint Chiefs of Staff memo in January 1962 which expressed concern with the rise nationalist movements in British colonies, that could seek the withdrawal of American forces. He did not speak out again on defense issues or Vietnam until after he left the World Bank. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) announced Monday he's launching a U.S. Senate campaign, setting up a three-way GOP primary as Republicans look to take on Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) This directive, Equal Opportunity in the Armed Forces, dealt directly with the issue of racial and gender discrimination in areas surrounding military communities. A problem that is attributed to McNamara is that he was overly concerned with ''who was essentially tougher''[127] when it comes to foreign relations, especially war. In 1961, he was named Alumnus of the Year by the University of California, Berkeley. It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. [112] Bundy stated that for Johnson to agree to McNamara's request to send more troops "was a slippery slope toward total U.S. responsibility and corresponding fecklessness on the Vietnamese side". [176] Johnson saw the hearings as proof that it was time to dismiss McNamara, whom he believed was "cracking up" under the strain of the war, as reflected in the Defense Secretary's criticism of the Rolling Thunder bombings. Elected in 1960 as the 35th president of the United States, 43-year-old John F. Kennedy became one of the youngest U.S. presidents, as well as the first Roman Catholic to . Although American defense planning focused on using nuclear weapons, Kennedy and McNamara saw it was clear the use of strategic weapons could be suicidal. [143] McNamara wrote that the idea that the American forces would temporarily stabilize the situation so the South Vietnamese could take over the war themselves was flawed as the dysfunctional South Vietnamese state would never be able to win the war, thus meaning the Americans would have to stay in Vietnam for decades to come. McNamara grew increasingly skeptical of the efficacy of committing U.S. troops to South Vietnam. "[141], In a memo of 19 May 1967 to the president, McNamara stated the military side of the war was going well with the Americans killing thousands of the enemy every month, but the political side was not, as South Vietnam remained as dysfunctional as ever. During the emergency in India, McNamara remarked "At long last, India is moving to effectively address its population problem," regarding the forced sterilization. )Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon (Cont. Jack Kennedy Schlossberg is the 30-year-old grandson of President John F. Kennedy and the son of Caroline Kennedy. [68] McNamara was stoutly opposed to Kattenburg's suggestion, saying "we have been winning the war". By 1967, McNamara was suffering visibly from the nervous strain as he went days without shaving and he suffered spasms where his jaw would quiver uncontrollably for hours. But he disapproved of the nationalizations". He charged that McNamara had placed too many restrictions on bombing North Vietnam to protect innocent North Vietnamese civilians. [44], In the Kennedy administration, McNamara was closely allied in debates in the cabinet with Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, with both favoring greater American support for South Vietnam. Now in its 17th year, the Secretary of State's IWOC Award recognizes women from around the world who have demonstrated exceptional courage, strength, and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equity and equality, and the empowerment of women and girls, in all their diversity, and more, often at great personal risk and sacrifice. [178] Privately, McNamara felt that Thurmond was an "ass", saying he was a bigoted, ignorant Southern politician whose only values were a mindless militarism, a fervent belief in white supremacy and a fondness for marrying women far younger than himself. [78] The same month saw a VC battalion in the Mekong Delta escape from a larger force of South Vietnamese troops, who had been rated as some of the very best in the ARVN by the American advisers who had trained them, a battle that underscored the problems in the ARVN. [66] When he of supporting a coup against Dim was first raised by Kennedy at a National Security Council meeting in August 1963, McNamara spoke in favor of retaining Dim. Rusk responded, "Does that include those who are buried here?" DeGaulle did not respond. About Image AR6289-A. And then our decisions turn around and make us. [198], A safe was installed in McNamara's office at the World Bank to house his papers relating to his time as Defense Secretary, which was a normal courtesy extended to former Defense Secretaries who might face controversy over their actions and wish to defend themselves by quoting from the documentary record. On Wednesday, October 24 at 10:00am EDT, the quarantine line around Cuba went into effect. [201] On 11 September 1973, Allende was overthrown in a coup d'etat led by General Augusto Pinochet. He concluded that there were a limited number of VC fighters in South Vietnam and that a war of attrition would destroy them. [163] To placate the Americans, the British were willing to offer a lease on Diego Garcia on almost any terms favorable to the Americans. [205][206][207], From 1981 to 1984, McNamara served on the Board of Trustees at American University in Washington, D.C.[208], He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1981. [45] Initially, the main concern of the new Kennedy administration was Laos, not South Vietnam.