Word: laird
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...initial hardware. The skeptical McNamara, backed by the White House, refused to spend the extra funds. The very next year, in the face of domestic political pressure and continued weaponry development by the Chinese and Russians, the Johnson Administration reluctantly reversed itself. Now the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Melvin Laird seems eager to press ahead at full speed with an ABM system called the Sentinel-despite hesitance elsewhere in the Administration and increasingly stubborn opposition to ABM in Congress...
...soon to gauge his long-term influence on Nixon. For the present, he clearly has a great deal. He sees the President an average of 90 minutes a day, apart from formal meetings of the National Security Council. Secretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird are not experts in their fields; Kissinger is in his. While Rogers and Laird have been relatively slow in reorganizing their mammoth departments, Kissinger immediately attracted attention by his speedy recruitment of staff members, many of them well-known specialists. Most of his aides were in place by Inauguration...
...RESPONSE to community and Congressional protest, Secretary of Defense Laird has halted construction of an anti-ballistic missile base in Reading, a Boston suburb. No further work will proceed at the site, the first of 14 planned around the country, pending completion of a general review of defense strategy in early March. The Sentinel ABM system, ineffective, wasteful, and unwisely provocative to the Soviet Union, should be severely curtailed...
...September 1967 speech to Congress, Laird's predecessor, Robert McNamara, described Sentinel as a "thin" system intended to meet the threat of a missile attack from China through 1975. No system, McNamara said, could be adequately effective against Russia's sophisticated arsenal, and he opposed any attempt to develop one. Russia would respond only by developing its offensive missiles until they can out-number or elude our anti-missiles, launching the crazy spiral of an arms race...
...kind of Brinksmanship and that Congress has okayed a program whose ends are radically different from those it approved. At a recent press conference President Nixon dismissed the idea that Sentinel was intended "simply for the purpose of protecting ourselves against attack from Communist China." Secretary Laird, speaking of the impending missile discussion with Russia, said last week, "I think it's most important, as we go into these talks, to have defensive as well as offensive missile systems up for discussion, debate, and negotiation...