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The Finest. McNamara has given absolute loyalty to both Presidents he has served, as well as a superlative performance in his job. Johnson was fully appreciative of his value from the time he surveyed the new Kennedy Cabinet in 1961 and called McNamara "the best of the lot." Whether imposing industrial techniques on the Pentagon (see box, preceding page), helping the President fight an aluminum price rise and settle a railroad labor dispute, or making practical contributions to racial equality in the services, McNamara seldom belied Johnson's description of him as "the finest public servant I have ever seen." On two occasions before the 1964 Democratic Convention, L.B.J. discussed the vice-presidency with McNamara, who declined the offer.
But even the best is not infallible; even the smoothest of relationships can wrinkle in Washington's political heat. The Secretary's constant scrapping with Congress, though in behalf of Administration policies, became a more serious problem as Johnson's own rapport with the Hill lessened. And like some other high officials, McNamara occasionally made euphoric prophecies about Viet Nam that, while politically appropriate at the moment, later turned into ammunition for Johnson's critics. The most unfortunate boomerang was tossed in the fall of 1963, when McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor predicted that most U.S. troops could be withdrawn from Viet Nam by the end of 1965.
Recently Johnson was heard to acknowledge that "McNamara has made some mistakes." One of these, in Johnson's opinion, was the 37-day bombing pause in the winter of 1965-66, which McNamara advocated over the President's misgivings. Yet neither the calculated gamble of the bombing pause —an attempt to induce negotiations with Hanoi—nor his increasingly obvious reservations about the air war against North Viet Nam made McNamara a dove. On the contrary, he was involved in every major U.S. move in Asia, and his voice—still being heard in the White House last week—was often the decisive one. Nonetheless, the doves who once twittered about "McNamara's war" came to look on him as their man because of the emotion-fraught question of bombing the North.
No Release. The change in his own view was manifest. In June 1966, after the U.S. attacked oil dumps around Hanoi and Haiphong, McNamara predicted "a lower ceiling on the number of men that can be supported in the South." By the following January, he was telling Congress: "I don't believe that the bombing up to the present has significantly reduced—nor any bombing that I could contemplate in the future would seriously reduce—the actual flow of men and materiel to the South."
In the President's more popular days, McNamara was a lightning rod for criticism. Now he had become a more direct conductor into the White House on the eve of a very tough election-year battle. He is too intelligent not to have realized this and not to recognize that he had lost a mite of the influence he had previously commanded.