Word: mcnamara
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...short, McNamara achieved President Truman's frustrated dream of unifying and centrally controlling the armed services. But this was not accomplished without heavy political costs--particularly on Capitol Hill, where many Congressmen preferred to deal with the services individually. It is likely that the political debits that McNamara accumulated in fulfilling this revolutionary task made him, after seven years of infighting, something of a liability in President Johnson's eyes...
...Secretary's legendary resilience and competence aside, it is difficult to separate the utility of the innovations McNamara brought into the Pentagon from the foreign policies they served. For example, under McNamara, the size, mobility, and adaptability of U.S. ground, air, and sea forces increased many times over. This novel rapidity in deploying our forces undoubtedly made President Kennedy's limited threats to the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis more credible and effective...
...this same capacity to commit American forces quickly to developing crises made it that much easier for President Johnson to escalate the Vietnam war in 1965 without sustaining immediate political and economic costs at home. The gnawing question remains: was McNamara so effective in making American forces immediately responsive to war that he removed our military operations from popular scrutiny...
...Vietnam, of course, the American public is likely to be far more vigilant when any President begins a piecemeal commitment of American forces to small, strife-torn countries several thousand miles away., It should be recalled, of course, that the post-1965 stage of U.S. involvement in Vietnam saw McNamara make a number of rosy--and utterly specious--predictions about the future of our operations there...
Despite his erratic track record on Vietnam, McNamara probably did more to illuminate publicly the complex strategic problems of the nuclear age than any American official since 1945. He demonstrated with compelling logic and eloquence the need for a strong "second-strike" nuclear capability--and noted, with accuracy, the need for forces to fight non-nuclear wars once it was clear that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. could not longer use nuclear weapons against each other without risking mutual destruction...