To ally and adversary alike, Robert Strange McNamara has always seemed a man of diamond-hard will and titanium physique. When his forthcoming departure from the Pentagon was announced last week, it seemed almost as if the Washington Monument had toppled from marble fatigue.
McNamara ruled the Defense Department longer and more efficiently than any of his seven predecessors, constructing the world's most powerful nuclear arsenal while fighting a limited war in Viet Nam and a seemingly limitless conflict with hard-nosed generals and fractious legislators at home. His administrative reforms became a model for other department chiefs while he performed a multiplicity of miscellaneous chores for the President. There was talk of his becoming Secretary of State, or perhaps czar of domestic programs and, in 1964, Vice President. In the years since, his tenure had become an American institution.
Thus, when the news broke—or crumbled bit by bit—that the Defense Secretary would soon leave his post for the relative backwater of the World Bank's presidency, the shock waves were felt around the world.† Given the morose mood of the moment, it was also understandable that many should reach the instant conclusion that Lyndon Johnson had dismissed McNamara out of hand, presumably to appease the generals whom the Secretary had held in check, and as a prelude to a wider war in Asia. Columnist Mary McGrory mourned "the last human barrier within the Government against the harsh and drastic steps recommended by the generals." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said it was "ominous and scary." Another old New Frontiersman, Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, conjectured that the Administration had yielded to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and "conservatives on the Hill" who wanted a "more compliant man" in the Pentagon.
Bismarckicm Parallel. Between the time that news tickers carried the first word to Washington on Monday afternoon and the public confirmation on Wednesday evening, McNamara's reassignment had been inflated into a palace revolution comparable to Kaiser Wilhelm II's dismissal of Otto von Bismarck in 1890, partly because the Iron Chancellor had opposed his sovereign's militant foreign policy.
The conspiracy theory was vigorously espoused by Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy and their aides. McNamara has retained close personal ties with the Kennedys (a fact used to support the argument that McNamara had been canned), and on Monday evening Bobby spent an hour with McNamara at the Pentagon. Next day, as Bobby passed him notes, Ted took the Senate floor to say: "I have heard that it is not a question of his having submitted his resignation." He went on to ask for the facts while Kennedy aides kept feeding misinformation into Washington's ever-ready fantasy factory.
Actually, the facts were reasonably clear, although the Johnson Administration, which habitually handles personnel changes ineptly, was at a considerable disadvantage in trying to set the record straight. Also the complicated relationship between two proud men could not easily be conveyed in the official statements that both at last made.