In early April 1966, nine months after urging President Lyndon B. Johnson to dispatch tens of thousands of combat troops to Vietnam, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara confided to a Pentagon aide: “I want to give the order to get our troops out of there so bad that I can hardly stand it.” Throughout his remaining 22 months in the administration, McNamara advised Johnson to temper the intensity of the conflict and seek a diplomatic resolution, all while faithfully carrying out the president’s orders to expand the war. Had he bluntly told Johnson to quit Vietnam and resigned in protest, thousands of lives might have been spared.
McNamara is remembered as a war hawk, the cold-blooded director of a conflict in which some 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese died. So associated was he with the Vietnam War that it came to be known as “McNamara’s War.” But letters, diaries, and other materials unavailable to previous biographers reveal that the defense secretary led a double life. He was a war proponent in the Johnson administration and a war opponent in private, at once driven by a lust to succeed in the president’s eyes and horrified by the human toll of what he came to see as an unwinnable war.
McNamara’s undoing was his contorted sense of loyalty to Johnson. Determining when fealty to a president should override one’s morality and duty to serve the Constitution is a challenge that civil servants have faced since the founding of the republic, and one they continue to confront today. McNamara made the wrong choices, and he regretted it for the rest of his life.
Among the documents that we uncovered was the diary of John McNaughton, the Pentagon aide who recorded McNamara’s candid impulse to bring the troops home in 1966. (The son of a McNaughton family friend mentioned the diary in a series of 2011 blog posts about him, and McNaughton’s eldest son—who inherited the journal after his parents and brother were killed in a plane crash—gave us a copy.) We also found the notes from McNamara’s meeting with Harvard professors in November of that year, in which McNamara sounds more like an anti-war leader than the sitting secretary of defense. “I don’t know of a single square mile of Vietnam that has been pacified,” he told the group. The graduate-student notetaker, Graham Allison, who went on to become an assistant secretary of defense under Clinton, observed that McNamara revealed himself to be “the most dovish principal in the government” and “unveiled a profoundly sensitive, subtle, and humane personality.”