“The military tactics are those of the sniper, the ambush, and the raid. The political tactics are terror, extortion, and assassination.”
Background:
• Born: 9 June 1916
• Best Known As: U.S. Secretary of Defense, 1961-68
• Credited: He created the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense Supply Agency.
• A native of San Francisco.
• Graduated in 1937 from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in economics with minors in mathematics and philosophy. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his sophomore year, and earned a varsity letter in crew. He was a member of the UC Berkeley Golden Bear Battalion, Army ROTC. He then earned a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1939. After earning his MBA, McNamara worked a year for the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse in San Francisco. In August 1940 he returned to Harvard to teach in the Business School and became the highest paid and youngest Assistant Professor at the time.
• Served in World War II and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After the war he went to work with the Ford Motor Company and became company president in 1960.
• Five weeks later he accepted Kennedy’s offer to serve in the cabinet as the defense secretary. McNamara restructured the military and moved from a reliance on nuclear weapons to a flexible strategy of conventional and limited wars meant to contain the communist forces of the Soviet Union and China. McNamara’s businesslike approach and use of non-military analysts rankled Pentagon officials, members of Congress and anti-war protesters.
Credibility:
• Not especially knowledgeable about defense matters, but he immersed himself in the subject, learned quickly, and soon began to apply an “active role” management philosophy.
• He rejected radical organizational changes.
“Foreign” Policy:
• The primary mission of U.S. overseas forces, in cooperation with allies, was “to prevent the steady erosion of the Free World through limited wars.”
• Kennedy and McNamara rejected massive retaliation for a posture of flexible response. The United States wanted choices in an emergency other than “inglorious retreat or unlimited retaliation,” as the president put it.
• McNamara increased the nation’s limited warfare capabilities. These moves were significant because McNamara was abandoning 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.
Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis:
• April 1961, a Cuban exile group with some support from the United States attempted to overthrow the Castro regime. The disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion proved a great embarrassment.
• It also was means for a creation of tension between Cuba and the U.S. This harboring of bad feelings left Cuba with an only option of allying with the Soviet Union.
• The Soviet Union began to arm Cuba with numerous missile silos. Being that Cuba is so near the borders of the United States, it was a point of great vulnerability and a threat to national security.
• McNamara supported the president’s decision to quarantine Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from bringing in more offensive weapons.
• During the crisis the Pentagon placed U.S. military forces on alert, ready to back up the administration’s demand that the Soviet Union withdraw its offensive missiles from Cuba.
• McNamara’s principal goal was deterrence.
• McNamara also wanted to provide the Russians with an incentive to refrain from attacking cities.
• McNamara sped up the modernization and expansion of weapon and delivery systems. He accelerated production and deployment of the solid-fuel Minuteman ICBMs and Polaris SLBMs and by FY 1966 had removed from operational status all of the older liquid-fuel Atlas and Titan I missiles.
• McNamara increased the number of strategic bombers, however he initiated calls for more spy planes to locate and confirm the missile sites. Although not all could be considered operational, he took their very existence seriously. McNamara’s contributions were articulated in his methods of reaffirming the infrastructure of the organization of defense and program consolidations as well as reduced costs.
Works Consulted:
“A Life in Public Service Conversation with Robert McNamara.” http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/McNamara/index.html
Brubaker, Paul. The Cuban Missile Crisis in American History. Enslow Publishers Inc, C.2001
“Oral Histories. Robert S. McNamara.” June 7, 2006. http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/McNamaraR/McNamara.asp
“Robert S. McNamara.” Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2006.
“Robert S. McNamara.” Secretary of Defense Histories. http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/secdef_histories/bios/mcnamara.htm
