Field Marshal McNamara.

• Author: Bacevich, Andrew J.
• Position: Book review

Lawrence S. Kaplan, Ronald D. Landa and Edward J. Drea, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. V: The McNamara Ascendancy, 1961-1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006), 664 pp., $49.00.

AFTER TEN days in office President John F. Kennedy reported to the American people on the state of the union. Outlining the "harsh enormity of the trials" lying just ahead, the president minced no words. "Our problems are critical. The tide is unfavorable." Already dire, the situation was rapidly getting worse. "Each day the crises multiply. Each day their solution grows more difficult. Each day we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger."

This emphasis on looming disaster--implying a need for fresh, bold leadership--had helped get Kennedy elected. Now it was becoming something more. Not for the last time in American history, promoting an atmosphere of unprecedented crisis served as a ploy to enhance executive authority while leaving the Constitution nominally intact. Crying havoc provided a rationale for concentrating political power in the Oval Office and in the hands of a few trusted lieutenants.

Among those the president turned to, no one was more important than Robert Strange McNamara, Kennedy's choice for secretary of defense. After all, the crises ostensibly multiplying daily came in the form of threats to national security. Danger lay abroad. If the nation had any hope of survival, it lay in erecting more effective defenses to prevent the dogs of war from slipping their leash.

A promise to reinvigorate U.S. national-security policy had defined Kennedy's presidential campaign. Making good on that promise meant transforming the armed services, making them more flexible and responsive--in a word, useable. In that same State of the Union address, Kennedy emphasized the necessity of having at hand "forces to respond, with discrimination and speed, to any problem at any spot on the globe at any moment's notice." Yet transformation required that his administration first gain effective control of the Pentagon. These twin tasks--establishing jurisdiction and then spurring reform--defined Secretary McNamara's mandate.

Nearly forty years after he left office in 1968, opinion about McNamara remains sharply divided. Some Americans, especially Vietnam veterans or aging antiwar activists, see him as genuinely malignant. Others, especially those keen to keep alive the myth of Camelot, view him as a tragic figure--a brilliant, well-intentioned public servant brought down by events beyond his control. This volume--the first of two on the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) during the McNamara years--tells a different story. Although the authors seem only dimly aware of the indictment that they hand down, it reveals McNamara to have been merely incompetent, someone spectacularly ill-suited for the responsibilities with which he was charged.

GRANTED, THE challenges facing the Kennedy Administration were real enough, especially when it came to asserting authority over the Pentagon. Since the end of World War II, civilian control of the military had become an iffy proposition.

By 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) had emerged as a de facto fourth branch of government. For public consumption, the chiefs carefully conveyed the appearance of being deferential to their civilian masters. For their part, presidents made a show of being really in charge. The reality was much more complicated. During the Truman and Eisenhower years, as the United States had committed itself to maintaining a permanently large, globally deployed military establishment, the JCS had evolved its own national-security agenda, overlapping with, but by no means identical to, the president's. In pursuit of that agenda, the chiefs had carved out broad prerogatives, their writ extending well beyond strictly military matters. Faced with policies to which they objected, they became adept at going around the president to cut deals with Congress. They ignored or re-interpreted directives not to their liking. They leaked and lobbied with impunity. More often than not, and especially on matters related to weapons procurement and overall spending, they got what they wanted.

In his farewell address--well-regarded today, largely ignored when first delivered--Eisenhower tacitly acknowledged that the "military industrial complex" had eluded his control. McNamara took his post intent on bringing the chiefs to heel. He would not permit them to obstruct or undermine the president's agenda. When it came to questions of basic policy, he, not they, would...