Deborah Shapley

The flap over Robert McNamara’s memoirs [b:In Retrospect|24178|Charlotte's Web|E.B. White|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167520504s/24178.jpg|987048] was startling. The impression from listening to commentators and letter-writers is that his mea culpa represented a turnabout and betrayal of everything the United States stood for during the Vietnam war.

Deborah Shapley’s excellent biography reveals a much more complicated scenario. (McNamara had told Shapley he would never write his memoirs; it would be interesting to know for certain what changed his mind in the years since 1992.) It is discouraging to discover years after an event how little we actually knew of the decisions that were being made behind the scenes. Shapley’s biography is full of such revelations — revealing again how close we came to nuclear holocaust during the Kennedy presidency. Eisenhower had reduced the military forces considerably during his tenure as president (much to the consternation of Maxwell Taylor, who resigned over Ike’s reductionist policy). When Kruschev fulminated and threatened about Berlin, Kennedy called up the reserves and increased the size of U.S. forces, calling for a force of a million men in Europe (providing the eventual source of troops for Vietnam). At the same time he encouraged civilians to build bomb shelters. In the meantime, McNamara had commissioned a supersecret study by several highranking generals to analyze what would happen in the case of nuclear war at different levels. He was horrified to learn from their study that in all cases the United States would be completely destroyed. The official policy of the United States under Dulles and Eisenhower had been massive retaliation. Kennedy changed the policy to one of “flexible” response. Under this policy, the immediate response to Soviet attack would be small tactical nuclear weapons, escalating only as needed. McNamara began to have serious doubts about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, following the secret study and the crash of a B-47 in North Carolina that released a bomb that fortunately did not explode. Yet, for ostensible reasons of deterrence, it was imperative that the government stand by its avowed use of nuclear weapons to counter hostile Soviet actions in Berlin. Anyone in the U.S. bureaucracy who suggested otherwise (even though Kennedy and McNamara had serious self-doubts about whether they would indeed use them) was severely reprimanded. McNamara later personally questioned the wisdom of lying in public. McNamara tried to export his success at Ford to the Defense Department. He was obsessed with a desire for economy and efficiency. Perhaps emblematic of his mania was the TFX, a fighter that was supposed to serve the interests of all the services. In one almost tragic scene, Shapely describes McNamara down on his knees on the floor in his office, surrounded by representatives of the manufacturers and the services, pawing through blueprints trying to find the elements missing that were needed to make the plane fly. The irony was that “to make his philosophic point about commonality, simplicity and efficiency, [he:] picked an unworkable set of common requirements, and hence a very sophisticated piece of hardware.” The TFX never got off the ground. McNamara’s tenure at the World Bank after he left government — he became more and more distressed with Vietnam and was eased out by Johnson — was more successful. Quantification was a more useful skill in dealing with problems of hunger and the poor around the world. But he remained aloof and was perceived as arrogant by his staff. “He loves humanity more than he loves human beings,” was the comment of one reporter.

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