Word: mcnamaras
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...alone in his effort. Surrounding him were the very best minds that America could produce. There was McGeorge Bundy, Superboy, who went to Yale instead of Harvard because "the Bundys had decided that after both Boston and Groton. Yale might be somewhat broadening." There was Robert McNamara, Whiz Kid, razormind under clicked down hair the Motor City intellectual who had a just for numbers and a remarkable ability to convince other people of things he did not believe himself There was Dean Rush the Georgia boy who became a Rhodes scholar an anticommunist fundamentalist a skipper who saved loyal even...
Again as in all proper tragedies, there are choruses to sound the alarum on the McNamara Rostow-Bundys, including old Senate Majority Leader Sam Rayburn ("I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once"). There was also plenty of handwriting on the walls. As early as 1954, General Matthew Ridgway had drawn up a report indicating that if the U.S. wanted to follow France into Indochina the price would be between 500,000 and 1,000,000 men tied down to a prolonged guerrilla...
...moralist, Halberstam tends to paint his villains monochromatic black. The distinctions between tormented, self-divided men like McNamara and a hyperoptimist like Rostow get blurred by the author's urge to define a single Viet Nam type. Halberstam's heroes seem more varied, more living. His few heroes are the men who said...
...Daniel Ellsberg, cornering McNamara on a plane to argue against escalation-"a Dostoevskyan figure" in mortal combat with a computer...
...four men above bear the brunt of David Halberstam's criticism. Two of them, Robert McNamara, who left the Defense Department in 1968 to become president of the World Bank, and ex-Presidential Adviser McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, refused to comment on the book. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, now professor of international law at the University of Georgia, had not read the book but told TIME: "I suspect Halberstam's biggest problem was that we didn't base our policy on his reporting from Viet Nam. This amateur psychiatry, talking about things...