The Wrong Man

JFK was so enchanted with McNamara that at the time of his death in Dallas, he was secretly plotting to make him secretary of state. By contrast, Bobby Kennedy privately considered McNamara "the most dangerous man in the cabinet, because he is so persuasive."

President Lyndon Johnson proved far more vulnerable than JFK to McNamara's powers of argument. Strangely insecure about his foreign-policy prowess (military affairs, after all, had been one of his congressional specialties), LBJ was certain that McNamara and other Eastern-educated JFK appointees possessed some genius he could never match. Knowing that LBJ was still nervous about seeming to stray from Kennedy's legacy, McNamara assured Johnson that JFK would have escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam, had he lived. During one of their taped telephone conversations in January 1965, Johnson felt compelled to warn his defense secretary to disregard Washington rumors that he was planning to ditch the American commitment there and "put the Vietnam War on Kennedy's tomb."

Two years later, McNamara's strategy of gradual escalation in Vietnam was going down in flames. The president concluded (with some evidence) that his defense secretary was privately colluding with his archenemy, RFK, to demand that LBJ wind down the war. McNamara's apostasy provoked the angry and suspicious Johnson to defy his enemies and keep reinforcing his "stand in Vietnam."

McNamara might have been the right man for the job—but not in the 1960s, a decade that demanded qualities he simply did not possess. How different our history might have been had JFK entrusted the Pentagon to his brother Robert, whose sensitivity to national motives, allergy to conventional wisdom, and willingness to abandon lost causes might have helped him to stem U.S. escalation in Vietnam. America's adventure in Vietnam and McNamara's central role in that tragedy are a powerful reminder of what a difference one presidential appointment can make.

Beschloss Is The Author, Most Recently, Of Presidential Courage.

© 2009