Reprinted with permission from American Opinion, June 1963
ITEM: From an article by Theodore H. White in LOOK, April 23, 1963:Says an Assistant Secretary, “You must remember that even in industry, McNamara is a new breed. Most industrial chiefs come up from the production or sales side. McNamara came up through the comptroller’s side; in American industry, the comptroller’s office is what the party secretary is in Russian government.”
CORRECTION: This is a colorful way to describe the career of Robert Strange McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense who, in the words of Dr. Stefan T. Possony, is “slowing down our technological progress deliberately” and preparing us for a technological Pearl Harbor (American Security Council, Washington Report, April 15, 1963). Who is Robert McNamara, who has been favored with one of the most extraordinary Press build-ups we have seen in recent years? He is described as a Renaissance man, a brilliant intellectual, an IBM machine on legs, a managerial genius. Stewart Alsop, in the Saturday Evening Post, went so far as to announce that “Robert McNamara has the highest intelligence quotient of any leading public official in this century.” One searches in vain, however, through the printed accounts of Mr. McNamara’s career for a record of the achievements or deeds of this great genius. He hasn’t written any books or pioneered a great invention or founded a great new industry. We are told, however, that he has read Galbraith’s The Affluent Society; Barzun’s The House of Intellect; and William Barrett’s Irrational Man, which is the usual intellectual garbage college freshmen absorb in their first year these days. (McNamara also read Profiles of Courage and was so moved by it that he read parts of it aloud to his children.) We are also told that McNamara once made a “controversial” speech at the University of Alabama in 1955 in which he said: “Today, progressive taxation places limits on the earning power of the businessman, and hence upon his purely monetary motivation. More and more he draws his incentive from a sense of public responsibility. More and more, I believe, idealistic and progressive young people will seek and find in industry not just a road to personal enrichment, but a most direct and effective means of public service.” That series of soft-sell Marxist clichés reflects the mind of a commonplace collectivist rather than a great “genius.” But why not? McNamara went to the University of California at Berkeley during the Thirties and then spent the next two years at the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Afterwards he taught at Harvard for three years where he met a “brilliant, hand-picked group of Army Air Force officers whose guiding spirit was Colonel (Charles) Thornton.” Colonel Thornton was a protégé of Robert A. Lovett, then Assistant Secretary of War. After the war, it was Lovett’s recommendation which got McNamara and Thornton their jobs at Ford.
McNamara’s rise at Ford is another “legend.” According to Elie Abel, “It is not easy to pinpoint McNamara’s specific contribution to the postwar success of Ford.” But as confirmation of McNamara’s “genius” we are told that he had a hand in changing the Thunderbird from a two-seater to a four-seater; setting the price level and the specifications of the Falcon; and scrapping the money-losing Edsel. We are not told what role he played in creating that fantastic financial flop.
Robert S. McNamara became President of Ford the day after Kennedy won the election. A mere coincidence, no doubt. This, of course, made him immediately eligible for the job of Secretary of Defense. And who brought him to Kennedy’s attention? Robert A. Lovett (the man most responsible for the removal of General MacArthur, and the man in whose home Forrestal had his final “mental collapse”), Adam Yarmolinsky (the son of Trotskyite Babette Deutsch), T. Herbert Shriver (brother of Sargent Shriver), Harold James Berry (of Harriman, Ripley and Company), and Sidney Weinberg (of Goldman, Sachs and Company, and a Director of Ford). A more impressive group of patriots you couldn’t find anywhere.Since “options” is another key McNamara word that has colored all Washington thinking, we should examine what “options” means, and where the word has brought us. “Options” means simply that civilized leadership should have at all times a variety of choices, an orchestration of forces, a range of responses that will permit instant dispatch of a company to quell a Southern riot, a battalion to beef up the Panama Canal defenses, a division to stabilize the Congo — or a total commitment in a clash over Berlin.
CORRECTION: Is it merely another coincidence that McNamara’s new Army bears a striking resemblance to the professional army of the future as described by de Gaulle in his book, The Army of the Future? The kind of army de Gaulle advocated is the kind most suitable to the needs of a World Government: highly mobile, made up of professionals who don’t concern themselves about motives, an elite corps devoted to military gadgetry. A perusal through the latest recruitment brochure issued by the Defense Department (ME62R-1036, 1MM) reveals that these are the very points being sold to the potential career soldier today. There is no mention whatever of patriotism as a motive. Men are being recruited on the basis of the economic security, technological skills, and “world travel” which a military career now offers. Who knows? There may be a lot of Southern riots to quell in the future.
“At least until the world has developed a workable rule of law in international affairs, the foundation of foreign policy is power — but it has to be usable power, controlled to serve reasonable political ends.”
CORRECTION: With that statement McNamara informs us that he is a full-fledged member of the World Rule through World Law club. Among his staff are Paul Nitze, a noted World Rule through World Law club member; Adam Yarmolinsky, his Marxist-oriented personal counsel and troubleshooter; Roswell Gilpatric, “an aficionado of Elizabethan poetry and yachting”; several obscure “economists” and Ivy Leaguers. With the defense of the Free World safely in the hands of these men, what more could a grateful nation ask for?