Robert McNamara was Defense secretary in the Kennedy Administration (1961-63) and the Johnson Administration (1963-68).
He was president of the World Bank from 1968-81.
"He reshaped the military for cold-war threats," the Christian Science Monitor says of McNamara,celebrating the uncanny parallels between the course he charted in Vietnam and Rumsfeld's current direction:
He brings a corporate executive's brazen ambition to scrap old ways, even if it rankles the top Pentagon brass. A national security crisis has emboldened him to transform the military, to exert greater civilian control over the services, and even to poach on the State Department's supremacy in foreign policy. His name: Robert McNamara. The year: 1962. The description also, of course, could be about Donald Rumsfeld, the current Defense secretary who exactly four decades later is embarked on a course with uncanny parallels to the early 1960s.[1]
His name: Robert McNamara. The year: 1962.
The description also, of course, could be about Donald Rumsfeld, the current Defense secretary who exactly four decades later is embarked on a course with uncanny parallels to the early 1960s.
Robert McNamara ordered the secret study that would later come to be known as the Pentagon Papers.
There would be no Pentagon Papers without Robert S. McNamara, who served Presidents Kennedy and Johnson as Secretary of Defense from 1961 through early 1968. During that time, he oversaw and promoted the escalation of the Vietnam War from a manageable number of advisers to more than 500,000 American troops engaged in a difficult war that eventually devastated three small, poor Asian countries; killed or wounded millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Americans; and divided America. Amid his own growing doubts about the war he had encouraged, McNamara quietly left the government in early 1968. Before doing so, however, he ordered a small staff in the Department of Defense to undertake a secret study of U.S. decision-making about Vietnam since the end of the Second World War. The study was directed by Leslie Gelb. [For information on how Gelb was later purged from the Carter administration: [2] ]
[For information on how Gelb was later purged from the Carter administration: [2] ]
It was Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers:
The study, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, was completed by mid-1969. Classified top secret, the study consisted of 47 volumes and about 7,000 pages, which included approximately 3,000 pages of narrative history and some 4,000 pages of appended documents. Only 15 copies of the study were made and distribution of the copies was controlled. Two copies of the study, however, went to the RAND Corporation, which did considerable work for the military. Daniel Ellsberg, whose service in Vietnam as a high-ranking civilian employee of the Department of Defense during 1965-1967 convinced him that the war was wrong and that the government was not being honest with the public about the war, had access to the study at RAND. He copied it and leaked most of it to Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter who had been in Vietnam.
A summary of the contents of the Pentagon papers:
...The Pentagon Papers played a role in turning an already disturbed U.S. public further against the war and in feeding the mistrust and siege mentality in the White House that eventually led to Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. The Papers showed that the U.S. had eventually supported about 80 percent of the cost of the failed French war against Vietnam; that the U.S. had engaged in covert action against North Vietnam as early as 1954; that the U.S. had undermined the 1954 Geneva Accords by hand-picking and supporting an unpopular South Vietnamese leader who ensured that no post-Geneva elections were held to unify Vietnam; and that the U.S. significantly increased its covert actions against North Vietnam in 1964 before overstating to Congress and the public what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.[3]
After leaving office, McNamara reportedly "declined to talk about the Vietnam War in public for twenty-seven years".
[Links to numerous papers on McNamara and Daniel Ellsberg: [4]]
In 1979, the University of Chicago awarded its Albert Pick Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Understanding to McNamara. This was done 'at the behest of its Straussian Neo-Con Political Science Department'. [5]
Leo Strauss is the ideologue who is the darling of the neocon crowd. Straussians include: University of Chicago's Alan Bloom, author of Closing the American Mind; PNAC signatory Francis Fukuyama - who was ideological guru to George HW Bush and is now bio-ethics advisor in the George W Bush Administration and PNAC signatory. [6] He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992); PNAC signatory Paul Wolfowitz , undersecretary of Defense in the administration of George H.W. Bush (1992), and now the Deputy Defense Secretary in the George W Bush Administration and a PNAC signatory. Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – "an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq." [x] William Kristol; Irving Kristol; Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence; PNAC signatory Gary Schmitt, the director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC);
From bombing to banking - McNamara leaves his post as Defense Secretary to become President of the World Bank:
The World Bank started innocently, loaning money to Western European governments to help rebuild their countries after World War 2. It was during the long rein (1968-1981) of former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara as president that the bank turned towards "development" loans to Third World countries.
It was during the long rein (1968-1981) of former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara as president that the bank turned towards "development" loans to Third World countries.
Military officers compare Rumsfeld (George W Bush Administration) to McNamara (Kennedy Administration):
Long-simmering tensions between Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army commanders have erupted in a series of complaints from officers on the Iraqi battlefield that the Pentagon has not sent enough troops to wage the war as they want to fight it. Here today, raw nerves were obvious as officers compared Mr. Rumsfeld to Robert S. McNamara, an architect of the Vietnam War who failed to grasp the political and military realities of Vietnam. [7] "This is tragic," one senior planner said bitterly. "American lives are being lost." The former intelligence official told me, "“They all said, ‘We can do it with air power.’ They believed their own propaganda.” The high-ranking former general described Rumsfeld’s approach to the Joint Staff war planning as “McNamara-like intimidation by intervention of a small cell”— a reference to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his aides, who were known for their challenges to the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War. The former high-ranking general compared the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Stepford wives. “They’ve abrogated their responsibility.” [8]
Here today, raw nerves were obvious as officers compared Mr. Rumsfeld to Robert S. McNamara, an architect of the Vietnam War who failed to grasp the political and military realities of Vietnam. [7]
"This is tragic," one senior planner said bitterly. "American lives are being lost." The former intelligence official told me, "“They all said, ‘We can do it with air power.’ They believed their own propaganda.” The high-ranking former general described Rumsfeld’s approach to the Joint Staff war planning as “McNamara-like intimidation by intervention of a small cell”— a reference to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his aides, who were known for their challenges to the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War. The former high-ranking general compared the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Stepford wives. “They’ve abrogated their responsibility.” [8]
To annihilate or not to annihilate, that is the question:
By the beginning of that autumn, it had become clear to many military analysts that the war was being lost, and, in particular, that the air war was boosting North Vietnamese resolve, instead of undercutting it. That led Robert S. McNamara to turn against the war he had begun, and he now urged a bombing halt. ''The sole strategy for knocking the North Vietnamese out of the war from the air, McNamara concluded,'' as Stanley Karnow summarizes it, ''would be some form of genocide.'' Or, as McNamara himself put it, ''the virtual annihilation of North Vietnam and its people.'' In late October, Lyndon Johnson decided against McNamara, and ordered an escalation of the bombing. He approved, in Karnow's words, ''air strikes against 57 new North Vietnamese targets - nearly half of them in heavily populated areas ...'' And one of the first pilots given that mission was [John] McCain. [9]
In late October, Lyndon Johnson decided against McNamara, and ordered an escalation of the bombing. He approved, in Karnow's words, ''air strikes against 57 new North Vietnamese targets - nearly half of them in heavily populated areas ...'' And one of the first pilots given that mission was [John] McCain. [9]
Why General Anthony Zinni called George W. Bush's war in Iraq a brain fart:
On Thursday night, Zinni, the former commander of the U.S. Central Command, was interviewed by Ted Koppel on Nightline. And he was rather sharp in his assessment of George W. Bush's policy in Iraq. Before the war, Zinni, who had been an envoy for Bush in the Middle East, opposed a U.S. invasion of Iraq, arguing that Saddam Hussein did not pose an imminent threat. On Nightline, Zinni compared Bush's push for the war with the Gulf of Tonkin incident--an infamous episode in which President Lyndon Johnson misrepresented an attack on two U.S. Navy destroyers in order to win congressional approval of the war in Vietnam-- and he challenged "the credibility behind" Bush's prewar assertions concerning Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and its association with anti-American terrorists. "I'm suggesting," Zinni said, "that either the [prewar] intelligence was so bad and flawed--and if that's the case, then somebody's head ought to roll for that--or the intelligence was exaggerated or twisted in a way to make a more convenient case to the American people." Zinni said he believed that Hussein had maintained "the framework for a weapons of mass destruction program that could be quickly activated once sanctions were lifted" and that such a program, while worrisome, did not immediately endanger the United States. [10]
