Robert Strange McNamara was a rather unlikely candidate for the job. At age forty-four, he had only months before Kennedy took office been made president of Ford Motors. Other Secretaries of Defense had been corporate executives; one, Charles Wilson, had been head of GM. But McNamara was different: he was an innovator, an intellectual, a liberal. He contributed money to the ACLU and the NAACP. Ford Motors was in Detroit, but McNamara lived in nearby Ann Arbor, where he could be closer to the academic community at the University of Michigan. He worked eleven hours a day, then came home to read books or attend meetings with a dozen or so other intellectuals and discuss national and international issues or new literary works.
During World War II, McNamara worked in the Statistical Control Office of the Army Air Corps as part of an operations-research group from the Harvard Business School that applied new management theories and techniques to make the war effort more efficient. Among his tasks was to figure out the logistical requirements and schedules of the Eighth Air Force, calculating how to mesh the right number of men with the right amount and types of equipment at the right time. Later, with the 20th Air Force in the Far East, he worked on the enormously difficult problem of getting B-29 bombers from India to forward bases in China and then on to their targets in Japan without running out of fuel. McNamara’s techniques were credited with giving the airmen of Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command 30 percent more flying hours.
After the war, McNamara and nine others from the Stat Control Office banded together to sell themselves as a group to some manufacturing firm eager to buy their collective skills. Henry Ford II, who had recently taken over the company from his father, took the gamble, and the group became known as the “Quiz Kids” or the “Whiz Kids.” They turned management practices at Ford Motors upside down, rationalized the place, swept the company’s finances out of debt. McNamara was central in this process, and later he helped design Ford’s first compact car, the Falcon. In November 1960, capping a meteoric rise through corporate ranks, McNamara was promoted to company president.
His experiences in the war and at Ford provided McNamara with the confidence that he could gain command of any situation and that he could do so more quickly and proficiently than the conventional experts in the field, whether they be auto executives or Air Force generals. McNamara was coldly clinical, abrupt, almost brutally determined to keep emotional influences out of the inputs and cognitive processes that determined his judgments and decisions. It was only natural, then, that when Robert S. McNamara met the RAND Corporation, the effect was like love at first sight.
John Kennedy formally introduced McNamara as his Pentagon chief on December 13. McNamara had been recommended by Robert Lovett, the venerable banker-statesman who had been civilian director of the Army Air Corps when McNamara was making his remarkable impression in Stat Control. When Kennedy and McNamara met, McNamara warned that he hadn’t really kept up with military affairs since shortly after World War II and therefore had doubts as to whether he could handle the job. Kennedy told him that there wasn’t any training school for Presidents either, but that after having talked with Dwight Eisenhower, he was certain he could handle his post. McNamara went to talk with Thomas Gates, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, and came back with the same conviction. McNamara was in.
McNamara forced one condition: he could choose his own subordinates. For the next week, McNamara holed himself up at a room in the Shoreham Hotel with a telephone and hundreds of three-by-five note cards, gathering information on an equal number of possible candidates for various positions. For the job of Pentagon comptroller, several people were mentioning the name of Charles Hitch, director of the economics division at the RAND Corporation and, by this time, a well-known economist and president of the Operations Research Society of America. McNamara had never heard of Hitch, but was urged to read his new book, The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age. McNamara was startled. Here was someone who was doing the same sort of thing that McNamara had done during the war—applying principles of microeconomics, operations research and statistical analysis to defense issues—but doing it on a much broader scale, covering the whole gamut of national security, including comparing and choosing weapons systems, restructuring the defense budget, formulating military strategy.
McNamara called Hitch on the phone and offered him the job of Pentagon comptroller. Hitch at first refused. For Hitch, it was a situation similar to that December thirteen years earlier when Johnny Williams had torn him away from the peaceful environs of Oxford University to come to RAND. McNamara’s was another all-too-tempting offer and Hitch ultimately accepted.
Hitch asked Alain Enthoven, a former fellow RAND analyst who had been working at the Pentagon’s R&D directorate for a year, to come join him as his Deputy Assistant Secretary for Systems Analysis. It would be a new office, Hitch’s own creation, that would apply the techniques of analysis that RAND had been practicing for longer than a decade.
Meanwhile, Paul Nitze, scribe of NSC-68 and the Gaither Report, critic of Dulles’ massive-retaliation policy, whom McNamara had chosen as Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, called Harry Rowen, Enthoven’s fellow Wohlstetter acolyte from RAND, to be his deputy. Both Rowen and Enthoven would frequently ask Wohlstetter for advice and consulting. Enthoven picked Frank Trinkl, Bill Kaufmann’s numbers-cruncher on the counterforce study, to be his deputy in charge of strategic offensive forces; when Trinkl left in 1964, Fred Hoffman, Wohlstetter’s partner on R-290, replaced him. Harry Rowen had Dan Ellsberg and Kaufmann do some consulting as well. Kaufmann resigned from RAND to spend half his time in Washington and the other half as a professor of political science at MIT.
Almost immediately after Kennedy took office, McNamara assigned several special task forces to do studies on various aspects of defense policy with an eye toward formulating a supplemental appropriation to the fiscal 1962 defense budget that Eisenhower had left behind. Paul Nitze would direct the project on conventional forces; the project on strategic nuclear forces would be handled by Charlie Hitch, Alain Enthoven and Marvin Stern, a young weapons scientist in the Office of Defense Research and Engineering. Hitch suddenly caught pneumonia, so Stern and Enthoven took over the study, with Enthoven reporting directly to McNamara.
Enthoven, a devout Roman Catholic, was almost broodingly intense about everything that occupied his mind. In his final days at RAND, he wrote a report on SAC vulnerability, a follow-up study to Wohlstetter and Hoffman’s R-290. Like Wohlstetter, whom Enthoven practically worshiped, he deeply felt that SAC vulnerability was the most important danger facing the Western world. When both Charlie Hitch and Bernard Brodie mildly criticized Enthoven for being too pessimistic, for giving the tone of his report “a certain accent of hopelessness and tragedy,” Enthoven replied, “Fundamentally I do believe that the situation borders on the hopeless and the tragic… I plead truth as my defense.”
Enthoven left RAND out of frustration and impatience, bitter and indignant that his report was all but ignored by RAND management. “I have lost patience with the whole climate that fosters the treatment of subjects of the utmost gravity and complexity in a slick 45-minute briefing,” he wrote to Bernard Brodie shortly after leaving RAND for the Pentagon. “Quite frankly I am sick of RAND’s emphasis on communicating everything in this fatuous way. My favorite caricature of RAND has Herman Kahn finishing a two-hour briefing full of important and exciting new ideas only to have one prominent member of the management say ‘Why is your fly open?’ while another says ‘You’ll have to cut it to a half hour.’”