However, notwithstanding the Pentagon’s gargantuan measurements — each of the five sides was seventy-seven feet high and nine hundred-and-twenty-one feet long — McNamara had inherited a building that was very much of its time and to some extent, trapped in the past. Putting aside its vast bureaucratic sprawl and the inevitably disconnected inter-service rivalries within it which spawned ludicrous duplications of work and mind-bogglingly inefficient working practices, the Pentagon had been built in an era of segregation and because it was in Virginia, not the District of Columbia, it had still been segregated when he walked through its doors in 1961.
McNamara had discovered much to his disgust that racial segregation — which he personally found morally and practically repugnant as a businessman, public official and as a human being in equal measure — had had significant deleterious structural implications for the design of the Pentagon. Absurdly, there were separate eating and washroom areas for whites and blacks, and extensive signage throughout the building managing the ongoing racial segregation. Whites dined above ground, blacks beneath ground. On each floor there were separate black and white washrooms, each separated in location and by gender to comply with the racial legislation in force at the time of its construction, and still in force in Virginia at the time he became Secretary of Defence. Bob McNamara might not have been able to achieve very much at the Pentagon before the October War but he had prevailed upon the President to abolish all segregation by race or colour in Government buildings by an Executive Order dated 4th July that year…
The Secretary of Defence’s senior personal secretary entered the room.
“General Westmoreland is here, sir.”
Forty-nine year old three-star United States Army General William Childs Westmoreland was McNamara’s ‘point man’ with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Westmoreland’s was a name already being bandied around as a future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. ‘Westy’ as he was known to insiders had a growing reputation as a ‘corporation executive in uniform’, making him exactly the sort of man that the former Ford Motor Company President needed at his side as he struggled to simultaneously manage the ‘peace dividend’ and to reorganise what was left of America’s dislocated military might into the formidable machine it still ought to be, peace dividend cuts or not.
The two men shook hands and sat in easy chairs away from the Secretary of Defence’s big polished desk.
“The Chief of Naval Operations is threatening to resign again,” McNamara told the man who was his de facto military special advisor and professional conduit to the Joint Chiefs.
Westmoreland nodded. The news came as no surprise to him.
Admiral George Whelan Anderson had been appointed Chief of Naval Operations in August 1961. Ever since then his relations with the Secretary of Defence had been on a downward spiral. Shortly before the night of the October War the CNO had ordered — yes, actually ordered — McNamara out of the Pentagon’s Flag Plot Room when he had sought clarification of the Navy’s operational protocols in connection with the interception, stopping and forcing to the surface of the four Foxtrot class Soviet submarines that the Atlantic Fleet had been tracking ever since they departed the Kola Inlet, near Murmansk at the beginning of October 1962. McNamara had described the incident as ‘mutinous’ and in the light of what had followed, he had held Anderson to blame for the incident in which the USS Beale had been destroyed. Despite his protests the President had refused to sack Anderson, and subsequently rejected the CNO’s resignation. Things had got so bad between McNamara’s Office and the Chief of Naval Operations that communications were now conducted almost exclusively between Westmoreland and the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral David Lamar McDonald, a no-nonsense Georgian who, possibly in the light of his boss’s breakdown of communication with the Secretary of Defence, seemed like a veritable scion of affable rectitude. It helped more than somewhat that McDonald and Westmoreland got on as famously as an army general and an admiral were ever likely to get on, given the legitimate and traditional rivalries of their respective services.
“COMSUBPAC,” Westmoreland prefaced, pausing to allow himself a rueful grin, “that’s Rear Admiral Clarey, flew in from Pearl Harbour last night, Mr Secretary. The Navy are paranoid about the command and control of their submarines. I believe that there was some kind of issue with one of Submarine Squadron Fifteen’s boats out of San Francisco. Admiral Anderson is all over it like a rash. I get the impression somebody’s head is going to roll.”
“One of our Polaris submarine’s had a command and control issue?” Robert McNamara asked, flatly. He had not felt so cold inside since that first Cuban-launched missile had initiated over Galveston Island thirteen months ago.
“The Chief of Naval Operations says he suspects the USS Sam Houston was mistakenly ordered to assume the operational posture of a hostile SSBN. That’s a standard exercise protocol. I requested more information on your behalf, sir, but Admiral Anderson promises a fuller report only when his people have had more time to crawl over the whole thing. The USS Sam Houston has returned to port and all her weapons and communications systems have been locked down until the Navy Department Special Investigation Branch has completed its work out at Alameda. SIB is looking into any possible connection between the murder of Read Admiral Braithwaite and his wife and this business.”
Westmoreland had been careful to remain aloof, as distanced as possible from the Secretary of Defence’s ongoing ‘professional differences’ with Admiral Anderson. In common with the majority of his peers Westmoreland deliberately did not have an opinion on whether Anderson was more or less personally culpable than anybody else in the military hierarchy around the President for what had gone wrong in late October 1962. However, he was less convinced when it came to the coterie of admirals who still, by and large, ran the US Atlantic Fleet from their bunkers in Norfolk, Virginia. Some of those guys had questions that needed to be answered and presently seemed to be positively itching to provoke trouble with the British Royal Navy; and that was something his boss, McNamara, the CNO and the President really ought to be doing something about!
“I’m still waiting,” Robert McNamara said, as if he was reading his advisor’s mind, “for a satisfactory response from Admiral Anderson with regard to the ongoing provocation of the Enterprise Battle Group operating in waters so close to the British Isles at this time?”
General Westmoreland nodded but remained silent.
Any day now the first of the first big relief convoys — Operation Manna — from Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere in the British Commonwealth, and from practically every other former colony still actively opposing American hegemony, would be arriving in the Western Approaches to the English Channel. Since the October War the United Kingdom had been surviving on dwindling strategic stockpiles, whatever crumbs the Canadians had been able to send to the old country and a trickle of ships returning home from around the World. The Administration’s decision to renege on its treaty obligations and to ignore pre-war trade agreements, effectively shutting the American market to British goods and curtailing British credit lines, had forced the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration to fall back on and practically exhaust its reserves of fuel and foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals and manufactures. The Kennedy Administration had been working on the assumption that sooner or later the UKIEA would come back to the table with a begging bowl. Crudely stated, in that event, it was taken as read that the remaining members of the Commonwealth would inevitably fall back in line with United States political and economic preferences, and thereafter, everybody would live happily ever after!