Word: laird
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...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...
Later in the week, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who was Nixon's military adviser during the campaign, reluctantly admitted that his boss was right on sufficiency-which to Laird was apparently synonymous with "superiority." To further that end, said Laird, the Nixon Administration would continue with the $5 billion-to-$10 billion Sentinel antiballistic missile system. Designed to ward off a primitive Chinese attack-but virtually useless against a heavy Russian assault-Sentinel, in Laird's view, would nonetheless be an important bargaining pawn when negotiations do start with the Soviets. Many Congressmen, who grudgingly agreed...
Whatever the outcome of the Pueblo investigation, it will be only a prelude to an even more intensive inquiry. Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird has ordered a top-level Pentagon study "to see that incidents of this kind do not happen again." However, the overriding significance of the Pueblo inquiry so far is not that the seizure occurred, but that a mentality existed in the U.S. Defense Department that allowed it to occur. That may take more than a Pentagon study to correct...