Though the ranks of the Whiz Kids in the Defense Department are proliferating, five stand out for the scope and strength of their influence:
Alain C. Enthoven, 31, intense and dark-suited, looks more like a young college professor than a weapons analyst. Yet, as deputy comptroller for systems analysis, this young economist must lay bare the calculations on which many defense decisions are made. After graduating from Stanford with honors in economics, spending two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and getting his Ph.D. from M.I.T., he joined the Rand Corp. think factory, where he helped direct a major study of Strategic Air Command operations and strategy that later became part of the Kennedy Administration's defense policy. Deeply concerned by the problems of defense ("The survival of the country seemed to be at stake"), he took a leave from Rand to work in the Defense Department two years ago, decided to stay on. Though he at first worked 70 to 80 hours a week, he is now in his office only from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Says he: "I can't increase output by working longer."
Harold Brown, 34, unlike most of the Whiz Kids, occupies a position of direct power as director of defense research and engineering. A forceful advocate of U.S. nuclear testing. Physicist Brown is Secretary McNamara's principal technical adviser, and is probably the scientist to whom President Kennedy now pays closest heed. Complains an Air Force officer who tangled with him over the derailed RS-7O bomber program: "He's awfully cocky and sure of himself." A Columbia Ph.D. at 21, he worked throughout the 1950s with the University of California's Radiation Laboratory, where he did research in the design and application of nuclear explosives, the detection of nuclear blasts, and the controlled release of thermonuclear energy.
Henry S. Rowen, 36, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for policy planning and national security affairs, also came to Defense through the Rand Corp. after graduating from M.I.T. and studying at Oxford. Planner Rowen concentrates on strategic questions for the future rather than day-to-day defense programs, originated major elements in the "no-city" strategy outlined by McNamara in Ann Arbor. Mich., last month; under it. U.S. retaliation to surprise attack would concentrate on Soviet military objectives and avoid destruction of cities. Articulate and wide-ranging in his interests—which may be NATO or guerrilla warfare—he worked at Rand on a broad study of overseas bases that turned into a full-dress comparative review of U.S. v. Soviet strategic airpower. "As soon as he touches a sensitive nerve,'' says an Air Force planner, "the military begin to yell. But he always knows what he's talking about."