Word: mcnamara
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...obvious lesson of the Pentagon papers is that bureaucracies do not always function as they are supposed to, especially in their primary role of advising the President. Less apparent are the reasons why. Leslie Gelb, 34, and Morton Halperin, 33, both middle-ranking officials in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara, played key roles in the preparation of the Viet Nam study, and are currently at work on books. Working separately, the two arrived at similar conclusions on bureaucratic breakdowns. Part of the answer, they suggest, lies in the "rules of the game" by which all Washington bureaucrats traditionally play. Some...
...Diem before his assassination the following day. WITHDRAWAL ADVICE. In an August 1963 session of the National Security Council, State Department Expert Paul M. Kattenburg recommended that the U.S. withdraw from Viet Nam completely. The suggestion was spurned by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; in the months that followed, the Diem coup and the deteriorating ability of the South Vietnamese to thwart the Viet Cong insurgency carried America into a deepening involvement in Southeast Asia. Kattenburg, then head of the State Department's working group on Viet Nam, told the NSC that popular...
...more clearly than ever that the U.S. is determined not to accept aggression without reply." Ambassador Foy Kohler carried the message to Deputy Foreign Minister Nikolai Firyubin with a request that the Soviets relay it to the North Vietnamese ambassador. Firyubin's reply: "I am not a postman." MCNAMARA AND BOMBING. Secretary of Defense McNamara quickly became disillusioned with the bombing strategy he had recommended to President Johnson and spent his last 16 months in office locked in bitter debate with military leaders in the Pentagon. He suggested contingency plans for sustained bombing of the North in March...
...Joint Chiefs of Staff were adamant in their opposition: General Wheeler called McNamara's proposal "an aerial Dienbienphu." McNamara's disenchantment grew; by May 1967 he was advocating a political settlement in Viet Nam that would include non-Communist members of the National Liberation Front. A month after McNamara's resignation as Defense Secretary, President Johnson withdrew from the presidential race and ordered a partial bombing halt along the lines that McNamara had suggested earlier. TET AFTERMATH. In a secret report to President Johnson, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Wheeler presented a more pessimistic assessment...
...seriously wanted to re-enter the Marine Corps, in which he had done a stint as an officer. He once gloomily said: "If I went back into the corps, they'd never give me a company anyway. Once they learned that I wrote speeches for McNaughton and Robert McNamara, they'd have me writing speeches for some general." He consoled himself by inserting such stridently militant phrases into McNaughton's and McNamara's speeches as "The only way to think of the Viet Cong is to think of the Mafia...