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A. The Cuban missile crisis was very, very bad. There was a moment on Saturday night, Oct. 27, '62 -- it sounds melodramatic and I don't mean to be -- when, as I left the President's office to go back to the Pentagon -- a perfectly beautiful fall evening -- I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night.
Q. Vietnam?
A. Well, in Vietnam there were a lot of important worst moments and less important worst moments. Psychologically, you're dealing with a problem for which there was no satisfactory answer, an answer that in part you're responsible for. And that is a terrible situation to be in. That kind of worst moment went on for a long time -- months, if not years.
Q. And the parents of kids killed?
A. That is a very, very burdensome problem.
Q. Why did you order the Pentagon papers prepared?
A. I felt we were not going to achieve our objectives -- politically and militarily -- and it was going to be essential at some point for scholars to determine how the policy had been formed, why the decisions had been made as they were, what the alternative decisions might have been, and what might have happened had the alternative decisions been pursued.
I think you will find that my memos to the President about that time -- 1966 -- said, "There is no good choice open to us." With hindsight, I think some of us misjudged Chinese objectives with respect to the extension of Chinese power. We thought there was considerable evidence China intended to extend its hegemony across Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond, but I'm not at all sure now that was their intent.
Q. Did Lyndon Johnson feel that you'd misled him, that you had led him to believe the war could be won?
A. No. No. No. No. He never felt that. I know that. To this day I don't know if I quit or I was fired as Secretary of Defense. The reason is that Johnson and I had an extremely close and complex relationship. Toward the end there | was tremendous tension between us over Vietnam. But I loved him and he loved me.
But he expressed the frustration. He'd say, "Why in the hell, McNamara, are you being so goddam difficult?" It was that kind of feeling. All the way through to the end.
You know, he had dreams for the country. The war had broken his dreams. But I think history will record that that man contributed immensely to this nation. In a sense, Johnson's objectives in the civil rights bill and Vietnam were the same. He was passionate in a way about human liberty and freedoms and believed he was advancing their cause in both instances. In hindsight it looks absurd to say that, perhaps. But without that civil rights bill -- if he did nothing other than that, and he did a lot other than that -- where would we be?
Q. And McNamara. What were his dreams at the time, his passions?
A. I accepted Kennedy's invitation to come down, and I accepted Johnson's invitation to stay because I believed in this country.