Word: mcnamara
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...study was begun in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had become disillusioned by the futility of the war and wanted future historians to be able to determine what had gone wrong. For more than a year, 35 researchers, including Ellsberg, Rand Corporation experts, civilians and uniformed Pentagon personnel, worked out of an office adjoining McNamara's. With his backing, they were able to obtain Pentagon documents dating back to arguments within the Truman Administration on whether the U.S. should help the French in their vain effort to put down Communist-led Viet Minh uprisings in Viet...
Beneath the patina of the published papers, other images form from those turbulent days. Early on, there was the alert, trim Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sitting at his huge Pershing desk, the believer of 1963, the man who thought it could be done and who kept saying "Things are getting better." Then, gray and pinched in 1967, trying to explain why he had become the first to turn publicly against the war. There was his tall, taut Assistant Secretary, John McNaughton, now dead, sweeping confident eyes across the map of the world and talking fast, very fast. Speaking ever...
...independent, non-Communist South Viet Nam." McNamara used identical wording in a memo to L.B.J. the same month, but fuzzed the goal by adding the far broader view of Viet Nam as a "test case of U.S. capacity to help a nation meet a Communist war of liberation . . . not only in Asia, but in the rest of the world." Then, in January 1965, McNamara penciled his approval on a statement by his assistant, McNaughton, that the real U.S. goal was "not to help friend, but to contain China." A month later, McNaughton, demonstrating the McNamara team's fondness for figures...
...August 1964 were among the most pivotal and controversial events of the war?and the Johnson Administration clearly deceived the public about them. U.S. officials claimed to be unaware that South Vietnamese naval units had been covertly operating in the area shortly before the Maddox was fired upon. McNamara was asked at a press conference on Aug. 5, 1964: "Have there been any incidents that you know
...year ago few members of the class would have believed that their Commencement (at the University that gave us napalm, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, William P. Bundy, John T. McNaughton, Leonard S. Unger, Henry A. Kissinger and a whole cast of infamous academies eager to discuss a brutal war in sterile, amoral phrases would pass quietly, without a murmur of antiwar protest...