Word: mcnamara
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Last November Secretary of Defense McNamara decided to cancel the development of the Skybolt air-to-ground missile. After making the announcement to the press in early December, McNamara flew to England to explain his decision to British Defense Minister Thorneycroft, who flatly informed McNamara that such a move was wholly unacceptable. During the following week the British press blasted the Kennedy Administration for its tactlessness and infidelity. Stunned government officials, including a large number of M.P.'s, began talking of reprisals and an "agonizing reappraisal" of Anglo-American relations. At Nassau, a hand-wringing Macmillan accepted...
...eliminate Britain from the nuclear club. The period of humiliation was designed, so the theory goes, to forceably impress upon the English, as well as DeGaulle, that the U.S. was running the nuclear armaments show and did not welcome competition. This explanation concurs with statements by both Kennedy and McNamara on the necessity for a "unified NATO command," which is today U.S. command. Enticing as this theory may sound, it does not quite square with the final outcome of the Skybolt affair. For the Polaris agreement provides the British with a better weapons system than the Skybolt-Vulcan bomber arrangement...
...second theory seeks to explain the clumsiness and apparent indirection of the U.S. policy from the time McNamara first announced his decision until the Nassau meeting. It maintains that McNamara acted independently of the rest of the Administration. After deciding to cut Skybolt for budgetary and technical reasons, McNamara made the cancellation announcement without having allowed anyone else time to fit his decision into a coherent foreign policy. The Administration's behavior seemed so muddled because it was essentially a reaction to McNamara's fait accompli. The fact that Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy figured nowhere...
...indeed is the plight if the American Gaullist. You and I and Secretary McNamara alike have all been deprived of our New York Times; and that is horrible enough. But for anyone who does not believe that Charles de Gaulle is some diabolical combination of Louis Napoleon and Bertrand Russell, breakfast reading of late has been an experience verging on the traumatic...
What is the possible purpose of such a Soviet establishment in Cuba? As both President Kennedy and Secretary McNamara insisted last week, it is certainly far too small to be regarded as an offensive threat against the U.S. mainland. But from Russia's viewpoint, it has other advantages...