Word: mcnamara
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...with a computer's correctness. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara certainly kicks up a lot of controversy. The Air Force, the Navy, the Joint Chiefs. Great Britain, Charles de Gaulle, many U.S. Governors and the Congress-he has fought them all. Last week Fighting Bob was at it again...
First he got mad at Arkansas Democrat John McClellan's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. The group was looking into McNamara's choice of General Dynamics Corp. for a $6 billion-plus contract to build a new fighter aircraft, the TFX, for the Air Force and the Navy. Washington's Democratic Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson had called Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric to explain that the voters back home-who will get a crack at Jackson next year-expected an investigation, since Seattle-based Boeing Airplane had lost the contract. But Jackson said the probe would be brief...
Undermining Integrity. Then the subcommittee began releasing testimony which claimed that McNamara had overruled his military evaluation experts in awarding the contract to G.D. Witnesses said that Boeing had bid lower to produce a plane that would perform better. Before submitting a 32-page statement to the subcommittee, McNamara protested in a public letter to McClellan. Wrote McNamara: "The fragmentary releases of portions of the testimony of witnesses who themselves are only familiar with part of the considerations underlying the decision have needlessly undermined public confidence in the integrity and judgment of the highest officials of the Department of Defense...
Civilian Dictation. About the same time, another McNamara decision-his refusal to speed production of the RS-70 supersonic reconnaissance bomber-came under fire on the House floor. Declared Illinois' Leslie Arends, ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee: "We have in fact, if not in name, a single chief of staff in Secretary of Defense McNamara. While we provided in the Unification Act for civilian control of our armed forces-and it is essential to our form of government that we have such control-we never for a moment thought that civilian control would become civilian dictation...
...descriptions and characterizations can leave an indelible impression on the listener: "I have great respect for Secretary McNamara. He is the first man since Forrestal to subdue the Defense Department--Forrestal committed suicide." The Senator's active wit appears in many guises. He has developed a large repertoire of anecdotes, many of them about politics and politicians, which he tells well. Some quips he intends largely to amuse: "The only subject on which Mr. about virtually every subject Congress considers, but foreign policy particularly interests him. At the beginning of his third year in the Senate he readily accepted...