Word: pentagons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When he first joined the Kennedy Administration in 1961, his attitudes were not generally popular in Washington. Yet he remained constant to his ideal. As Deputy Assistant Secretary for Arms Control, as the Pentagon's chief representative on the nuclear test-ban team to Moscow, and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, he always sought the proportioned response--the wide range of political alternatives to military pressure, where possible. He exerted beneficial and imaginative influence over Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara...
When the first came to the Pentagon from the Law School, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Arms Control. He continued his interest in disarmament while he was the Defense Department's General Counsel and in his last post as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs. McNaughton was the chief Pentagon staff man on the team that negotiated the nuclear test-ban treaty in Moscow...
Realistic Figure. As for the U.S. forces, some officers in Saigon threw out the misleading information that no more than 75,000 troops were actually available for combat. But Pentagon sources quickly pointed out that the figure failed to include artillerymen, engineers, signalmen, reconnaissance men and helicopter crewmen-none of them infantrymen, true, but all of them combat forces nevertheless. A more realistic figure, the sources conclude, is between 100,000 and 110,000 combatants out of the Army's 302,000 troops in Viet Nam, plus 68,000 of the 79,000 Marines...
...Pentagon reckoning, 37% of the troops assigned to the air and ground war are thus available for combat-far more than some officers in Saigon estimate. The figure is substantially lower than the World War II and Korea rate of 57%, but that is mainly due to the fact that thousands of construction troops were there to develop ports and airfields in the primitive country...
When word of McNamara's statement reached Westmoreland, the general was hopping mad. Having returned to the U.S. to attend the funeral of his 81-year-old mother in Columbia, S.C., he flew up to Washington to confer with the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon. He was barely able to conceal his anger over the suggestion that U.S. forces were not being used at full efficiency. It seemed he was taking a bum rap so the President and McNamara could hold down the budget deficit and avert a bigger tax increase...