MCNAMARA: THE LIGHT THAT FAILED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000200060002-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 17, 1999
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: November 18, 1967
• Content Type: NSPR

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7
~ . j to s of State, by Stewart Alsop
, vr:~N,4a Mara E th(a
WASHINGTON:
esmond FitzGerald, a deputy director of
the Central Intelligence Agency, who
died of a heart attack recently at the
age of 57, was one of the best profes-
sional intelligence men this country has produced.
Back i., the era when only U.S. "advisers" were
involved in the Vietnamese war, it was his job to
brie,' Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on
Lie war.
Every week FitzGerald would come into Mc-
Nam, a a's huge Pentagon office at the appointed
hour, to find McNamara surrounded by charts
and tables of statistics which "quantified" the
progress of the war. FitzGerald would summarize
that week's intelligence input, while McNamara
took notes in his tiny handwriting, occasionally
interjecting an incisive, factual question. One
day FitzGerald asked McNamara if he could
make a personal comment, and McNamara
nodded.
"Mr. Secretary," FitzGerald said, "facts and
figures are useful, but you can't judge a war by
them. You have to have an instinct, a feel. My
instinct is that we're in for a much rougher time
than your facts and figures indicate."
-."You really think that?" McNamara asked.
"Yes, I do," said FitzGerald.
"But why?" said McNamara.
"It's just an instinct, a , feeling," said Fitz-
.Gerald.
McNamara gave him a long, incredulous stare.
It was, FitzGerald later recalled, rather as though
he had said something utterly and obviously
mad. McNamara said good-bye politely, but that
was the last time FitzGerald was ever summoned
to his Pentagon office.
No man is flawless, and this small episode from
the past precisely defines the flaw in Robert
McNamara. McNamara is, in this reporter's
opinion, a great public servant. He has to his
credit two towering achievements for which the
United States is deeply in his debt.
He is the first Secretary of Defense with the
ability, experience, and just plain guts to bring
the vast, sprawling, hideously bureaucratic U.S.
Defense establishment under effective civilian
control. He is also the first Secretary of Defense
to face up squarely to the grim fact that the
nuclear weapon is an inherently irrational instru-
ment of power, since it is a suicidal instrument;
and to draw the necessary strategic conclusions
from that fact. McNamara's speech in Septem-
ber, in which he discussed those conclusions, was
a genuinely brilliant intellectual exercise and a
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ght that ft!ed
major historical document: Yet for all his bril-
liance, McNamara is in bad trouble, and - he
knows it.
Partly he is in trouble because he provides a
convenient scapegoat. But he is also in trouble
partly because he has lacked that "instinct," that
"feeling," which Desmond FitzGerald had, and
which McNamara so disdained.
There are powerful forces in this country that
badly need a scapegoat. With his dangerous com-
pulsion to tell the truth as he sees it, McNamara
has repeatedly told Congress (to quote The New
York Times) that the vast weight of bombs on
North Vietnam has "not significantly affected
North Vietnam's war-making capability nor
seriously deterred -the flow of men and materials
to Communist-led forces in South Vietnam."
Saying this is like hitting the powerful ad-
vocates of the air-power legend in the face with
a large, red rag. The air-power legend holds
that air power is the decisive instrument of war.
The legend accounts for the fact that for years
the U.S. Air Force, plus the Navy Air Arm,
has regularly spent the lion's share of every
defense dollar. It also accounts for the fact
that the air-power advocates are the most
powerful spokesmen of what Dwight Eisenhower
called "the military-industrial complex."
Now the war in Vietnam is proving all over
again, only more vividly, what World War I I and
Korea proved twice over-that air power, stra-
tegic nuclear war aside, is an indispensable but
subsidiary military instrument. Underlining this
point in testimony like that quoted above is
hardly calculated to endear McNamara to the
air-power advocates.
The war in Vietnam is proving once again that
"wars are won bloodily, on the ground, not
cleanly, in the air" (to quote a report in this space
on the Vietnamese war more than two years ago).
But the war is not being won-or not very rap-
idly-on the ground either, despite the commit-
ment of more than half a million men and the'
spending of more than 20 billion dollars a year.
As the sense of frustration and disillusion with
the war mounts, the need for a scapegoat mounts
with it. McNamara has clearly been nominated
for that role.
Much of the current assault on McNamara is
specious and self-serving. Yet McNamara is vul-
nerable to honest criticism too. His judgment on
the war has twice been dangerously wrong.
In the early "advisory" era of the war. Mc-
Namara interpreted his facts and figures to mean
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After that fact became obvious, and U.S. troops
were committed to prevent total defeat, Mc-
Namara concluded, on the basis of impeccable
logic, that it would only be necessary to persuade
the Communists that "they can't win in the
South." Then, "we presume that they will move
to a settlement." He was wrong again.
He was wrong, at least in part, because of that
disdain for "instinct" and "feeling" which is so
.much a part of the man. Unlike Desmond Fitz-
Gerald, who had a magnificent combat record in
the Second World War, McNamara has nothing
in his personal experience to teach him what war
is really like-an Air Force logistics expert,
which McNamara was in that war, does not learn
much about war's harsh realities. One of war's
realities is that running a war is not like running
the Ford Company. War is an essentially un-
reasonable and illogical pursuit. It cannot be
"quantified" because there are too many human
and other imponderables involved. There is no
way to quantify, for example, the totally irra-
tional determination of the Communist side in
Vietnam to fight on, when all McNamara's facts
and figures point to the conclusion that Ho Chi
Minh and Company should have "moved to a
settlement" long ago.
McNamara has an almost Calvinistic horror
of emotion, an almost mystical reverence for
reason. All correct decisions, he has often said,
must be made "on the basis of reason, not emo-
tion." But reason has been, for Robert Mc-
Namara, the light that failed.
McNamara is certainly a troubled man. He
has seriously discussed with close friends-in-
cluding Sen. Robert Kennedy-w. ether or not
he ought to resign. His friends have pointed out
that he would be resigning under fire, on no clear
and decisive issue, with the war still dragging on.
Moreover, he is desperately needed where he is.
So far, such arguments have prevailed, and
Robert McNamara has been persuaded that he
ought to stay where lie is as long as the Presi-
dent wants him.
McNamara is not a man who wears his heart on
his sleeve. But he is a deeply sensitive man, be-
hind the brisk exterior, and he hates, above all
other things, to be wrong. One senses that he
knows his light has failed, and that its failure trou-
bles him far more deeply
than all the harsh things
the generals and the sena-
fZo' 18 1967
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