TY - JOUR
AU - Basha i NovoseJt,, Aurélie
AB - On May 18, 1966, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara delivered a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Montreal entitled “Security in the Contemporary World.” Building on remarks that he had made in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), the title was deceptively bland and belied its significance. McNamara, heretofore loyal to Johnson, was publicly breaking ranks with official administration policy on Vietnam. In the weeks prior, back in the Pentagon, McNamara had considered and authorized the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s (JCS) proposals, which National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow had endorsed, to expand Operation Rolling Thunder, a gradual but sustained aerial bombardment campaign against North Vietnam. In Montreal, however, he described the “special satisfaction for a Secretary of Defense to cross the longest border in the world and realize that it is also the least armed border in the world.” He reflected on the “narrow” and “stereotyped terms” that framed discussions of national security, as well as the “eradicable tendency to think of our security problem as being exclusively a military problem.” In lieu of these “clichés,” he suggested that “security is development” and that poverty in the developing world was a greater challenge to international security than a Communist master plan.1 The speech was classic McNamara. It began with a statistical exposé of wars and extolled the strength of U.S. defense, only to continue with a more controversial point. “We have come to identify ‘security’ with exclusively military phenomena, and most particularly with military hardware. But it just isn't so,” he warned. He suggested that acquiring and employing military power faced diminishing returns: “A nation can reach the point at which it does not buy more security for itself simply by buying more military hardware. We are at that point.”2 In thinly-veiled criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam, he suggested communism was an ideology that merely appended itself to conflicts that were ultimately about poverty. “It would be a gross oversimplification,” he noted, “to regard communism as the central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped world.” In SFRC hearings, he added, “I can only say the undeveloped nations of the world—the new nations of the world—of which Vietnam is certainly one, are going through a period of birth pains.”3 The speech connected the issue of global insecurity to inner-city problems at home. “Even in our own abundant societies,” McNamara warned, “we have reason enough to worry over the tensions that coil and tighten among under-privileged young people and finally flail out in delinquency and crime.” McNamara drew attention to the Selective Service system as “an inequity” and suggested a universal national service program.4 The speech, perhaps the most personal that McNamara ever gave, ended with a reflection about the human condition, one that undoubtedly hinted at his feelings about his time at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD): “Who is man? Is he a rational man?” McNamara asked. He added, “All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal—but with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for Utopia. But never quite gets it built. In the end, he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand: his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed, but part-glorious nature.”5 Predictably, the speech surprised observers who saw “the real McNamara [stand] up” to reveal “his own deep personal convictions” and “the highly-efficient, cost-conscious machine turn into a person.”6 “A measure of the surprise engendered by the speech,” The Washington Post noted, “was its publication in full in the London Daily Mail, resulting in a flood of favorable letters.”7Time Magazine applauded a “different speech from a different Robert Strange McNamara.”8 Senatorial reaction hinged primarily on the secretary’s final suggestion to reform the draft. Other commentators at the time, and historians since then, correctly interpreted the speech as a reflection of McNamara’s anger with State Department and White House leaders regarding Vietnam. New materials add depth to this interpretation as they show that McNamara’s remarks in Montreal were connected to developments in and around the OSD between the fall of 1965 and 1966. The timing and the location of the speech were important. The speech coincided with developments in relations with Canada, most notably the “Ronning Mission.” McNamara had advocated a bombing pause in Vietnam in November 1965 hoping that it would encourage negotiations with the North. From January to June 1966, Chester Ronning, a Canadian diplomat, had opened a channel to the North Vietnamese, igniting hopes that the DRV might be ready to talk. Whereas historians largely agree that the administration never took Ronning’s efforts seriously and that they produced little, in May 1966, McNamara had been hopeful.9 New presidential recordings reveal that McNamara experienced the eventual failure of Ronning’s efforts as a personal affront that further isolated him within the administration and thus forced his hand into supporting an escalated bombing campaign, in particular the decision to bomb petroleum, oil and lubricants (POL) targets in June 1966. Ultimately, when his argument that a bombing pause would spur talks came to naught, he defaulted back to the position that stronger military pressure against North Vietnam might induce diplomacy. The fact that the Montreal speech echoed Senators George McGovern or William Fulbright’s criticisms of Vietnam policy was not incidental. In the months leading up to May 1966, liberal voices in Congress had become more critical of the administration’s Vietnam policy, causing a break that would ripple through the Democratic party for the next decade. However, McNamara and his colleagues at the Office for International Security Affairs (ISA) who drafted the speech, particularly Assistant Secretary John McNaughton and his deputy Adam Yarmolinsky, were not intellectually distinct from these congressional leaders. Yarmolinsky, who had the lead responsibility for writing the speech, was especially embedded in liberal communities. Both Yarmolinsky and McNamara not only agreed with the latter’s criticism of the war, especially regarding its domestic impact, they informed and encouraged Robert F. Kennedy’s ascent as the flagbearer of the backlash against President Johnson. This paper sheds new light onto frustrations that McNamara shared with colleagues and confidants at ISA. It draws on Yarmolinsky’s largely untapped papers at the John F. Kennedy Library, McNaughton’s private diaries that are not yet publicly available, and Edward Kennedy’s newly-released oral histories. In addition to clarifying the nature of McNamara’s frustrations with the war, the paper aims to better situate Yarmolinsky in the otherwise rich historiography of McNamara’s tenure at the OSD. Yarmolinsky is important to understanding McNamara’s tenure at the OSD not so much because of any putative influence on the secretary’s views regarding the war, but because his career trajectory reveals a more socially progressive and humanist side to McNamara’s time at the OSD, one that undermines the latter’s image as a blinkered number-crunching war manager. By 1966, ISA had become a hub of dissent on Vietnam. This paper shows that McNamara and his colleagues at the OSD drew “lessons” from Vietnam that differed from those eventually found in his memoirs, In Retrospect.10 In 1966, for them, the lessons of the Vietnam War were rooted in bureaucratic realities in Washington. Yarmolinsky’s later academic work focused on civil-military relations and the bureaucratic realities that had made Vietnam possible: civilians decision-makers consistently favored, and congressional leaders primarily funded, military solutions. His criticism was aimed in equal measure at the White House and civilian national security decision-makers as it was congressional leaders. It combined the intellectual substance of progressive criticism in Congress with a pragmatic assessment of realities within the executive branch of government. That message has contemporary resonance: in many respects the United States remains a country “wired for war.”11 This article also adds a layer to the historiography on the oppressive decision-making style of the Johnson administration. It suggests that McNamara, described in so many histories of the war, including those by H. R. McMaster, Fredrik Logevall, Robert Dallek, and Larry Berman, as the “arrogant” bully and silencer of meaningful debate, also often felt cornered as he censored the same views that he espoused in private.12 Despite McNamara’s later musings on his time as Secretary of Defense, his memoir In Retrospect reflected the loyalty and discretion that characterized his time in office. As one OSD colleague quipped, “these guys don’t give deathbed confessions.”13 As a result, the OSD during McNamara’s tenure has largely remained a black box for historians. The new materials used here, particularly Yarmolinsky’s record in office and subsequent writings, help to break through some of that opacity. Adam Yarmolinsky at the OSD Beyond substantive policy differences, the Montreal speech reflected the personal frustrations of its authors at ISA, none more so than Yarmolinsky. In addition to their professional roles at ISA, McNaughton and Yarmolinsky were two of McNamara’s rare confidants. But whereas historians have explored McNaughton’s role and now accept that he was a “disillusioned strategist” and “secret dove” in McNamara’s inner circle, they have largely overlooked Yarmolinsky.14 In part, this may be because his presence fits uncomfortably with the conventional narrative of McNamara as a ruthless whiz-kid or perhaps because he lacked formal authority. His presence in the written record is scarcely better: he wrote just one, handwritten copy of each of his letters or memoranda to McNamara.15 This modus operandi reflected the discrete and somewhat conspiratorial relationship between the two men. Like many other secondary advisors in the Kennedy administration, a formal position did not determine Yarmolinsky’s power; personal connections mattered. McNamara often began and ended his days with Yarmolinsky, and in crucial moments—for instance in the days that followed President Kennedy’s assassination—Yarmolinsky was often the only person with whom he spoke.16 Although as McNaughton’s deputy Yarmolinsky lacked official influence on Vietnam decisions, he nevertheless played a part in shaping McNamara’s intellectual trajectory. This “pint-sized” man, which one newspaper described as “having the misfortune of looking like an anarchist bomb thrower in old political cartoons,” had been by McNamara’s side since the transition into the Kennedy administration. He was a “Kennedy man” par excellence and his career in government up to 1966 speaks also to a broadening divide between “Kennedy men” and Johnson.17 By 1966, both within and without government, men like Yarmolinsky began to draw comparisons between the two Presidents and sought to reignite the hopes of the New Frontier. On the face of it, Yarmolinsky was an unlikely advisor and friend to McNamara. A lawyer by training, he spent much of his pre-government career preoccupied with domestic issues and liberal causes, a fact that would later provide a beating stick for right-wing groups. His parents, Avraham Yarmolinsky and Babette Deutsch were liberal New York intellectuals who encouraged their son’s path into progressive politics.18 Yarmolinsky went to Harvard University and, after graduating from Yale Law School, became involved in projects for the Fund for the Republic on civil liberties and race issues, and advocated for fairer legal procedures for individuals falsely accused under the federal loyalty rule.19 In a series of articles published in the 1950s, he defended victims of the “red scare” including J. Robert Oppenheimer, warned of the dangers to due process that loyalty programs posed, and cautioned against the “emotional pressures of the Cold War.”20 His writing made him few friends in the Republican Party, which was especially virulent in its criticisms of Yarmolinsky after he admitted to having attended two meetings of the Young Communist League during his teenage years “out of curiosity.”21 In 1960, although he had supported Adlai Stevenson’s earlier presidential bids, Yarmolinsky joined the Kennedy campaign and began a lifelong journey as a “Kennedy man.” After the election, he worked with Sargent Shriver on the talent hunt for administration appointments and was instrumental in the selection of McNamara, whom he had met in the 1950s on a project for the Ford Foundation. Although he described himself as “to the left” of the Kennedy group, Yarmolinsky joined the campaign because he was impressed with its “combination of energy and practicality [which] added up to what I would characterize as a significant ability to turn ideas into programs.”22 Becoming a Kennedy man meant that he developed more political skill or, as he described in his eulogy for Robert Kennedy, “an awareness of the gap between the proposal and its execution, and a determination to bridge that gap.”23 He also developed a deep-rooted loyalty to the Kennedys and to McNamara that would bind him to them for the rest of his life.24 Yarmolinsky brought these “can-do” attitudes and strict notions of loyalty to his role as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, a position specially made for him. Initially, as part of his job Yarmolinsky was expected to liaise with the White House and liberal intellectual communities, but with time, his responsibilities became more dispersed. He described the position as a “general” rather than a “special one,” and wrote that, “I find myself doing a little bit of everything, operating mostly out of ignorance and learning as fast as I can about this strange, new world.”25 In a speech delivered in 1961, he explained that the government needed generalists, “practitioners in the art of government” who were able to see beyond specialist knowledge to the public interest. He expounded the value of “toughness” shared by the new generation of Kennedy men and likened them to “Renaissance men.”26 News reports at the time labeled him mistakenly as the “captain of the whiz kids” whose energy, youth, and style defined the new breed of “intellectuals turned operators” who were bound together by informal links forged during their pre-presidential days.27 Yarmolinsky was not a “whiz kid”; mathematical analysis was less important to him than process and legality. In fact, he focused on this process-oriented approach to addressing issues. In a speech delivered in 1963, he explained how the American Revolution was a “lawyer’s revolution” that focused on procedural issues. He argued that all meaningful reform within the United States should “create a process that better serves the common interest.”28 This lawyerly approach offers another perspective on McNamara’s reforms at the Pentagon that centers less on the secretary’s personality traits and individual power. Building on President Eisenhower’s legislative legacy, McNamara’s greatest reforms were, in practice, procedural, whether streamlining the budget with the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) or cutting off direct reporting lines between the Chiefs and the President in a way that centralized authority around the OSD. Civilian and centralized control in the OSD was at the core of each of McNamara’s reforms. Just as President Kennedy often set up informal task forces or special groups with his brother at the helm, McNamara regularly assigned Yarmolinsky to sensitive task forces. For instance, Yarmolinsky was involved in determining whether—as Kennedy had mistakenly argued during the election campaign—a missile gap existed. He was a sounding board for McNamara, and a counsel during moments of crisis. This included the Cuban missile crisis, when Yarmolinsky, together with McNaughton, concluded that the missiles constituted a political problem and not a military threat.29 Writing to the Service Chiefs after the crisis, Yarmolinsky summarized the events as a case where political and military issues were so intertwined that it required centralized authority in “the man preeminently responsible for national security, that is the hands of the President,” to resolve it.30 It was on this issue of civilian authority over the services that Yarmolinsky first became embroiled in a public row with the same enemies that would eventually end his government career. He was a key target in the “muzzling hearings,” which Senators Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond launched in February 1962 when they accused the OSD of silencing military officials. The triggers for the hearings were first, a confrontation between the OSD and General Walker from the 24th Infantry Division in Germany in 1961 after it emerged that Walker had distributed John Birch Society material during the election, and second, the September 1961 directive from the OSD that required military leaders to ask for clearance from civilian authorities before making speeches or public statements to rid them of “color words,” comments that might indicate an overstep into political commentary.31 On one level, the hearings aimed to thwart McNamara’s centralization of authority in his office. However, behind thinly-veiled anti-Semitism, they also specifically targeted Yarmolinsky by claiming that communists like him had infiltrated the Department of Defense. The most dramatic moment in the hearings came when Thurmond, expecting McNamara to disavow his Special Assistant, demanded that McNamara release the names of the men in charge of implementing the clearance policy. Instead, McNamara argued that the men were following instructions emanating from the secretary himself. President Kennedy backed him up and threatened for the first and only time in office, to invoke executive privilege, namely the right of the executive branch to withhold information to protect its ability to function effectively.32 This was the first of several occasions when McNamara stepped in directly to shield Yarmolinsky. For McNamara and Yarmolinsky, the battle over the muzzling hearings was fundamentally a clash between civilian versus military values at a time when military authorities seemed dangerously out of step with, even resistant to, a Democratic administration pushing the new policy of flexible response. As McNamara later recounted, “I wasn’t an expert of the Soviet Union but I did recognize that a degree of paranoia existed in certain parts of our Republic.”33 By defending Yarmolinsky, the administration made it clear that it would not change course nor would it be disloyal to key players in the administration. In 1962, Yarmolinsky collided with Congress again when he returned to domestic issues and, together with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, tackled segregation in the armed forces. The Gesell Committee, or the President’s Committee on Equality of Opportunity in the Armed Forces, was named after its nominal chairman Gerald A. Gesell, but for all intents and purposes Yarmolinsky ran the committee and staffed it with friends and fellow Yale alumni. Officially, the committee’s mandate was to study the extent to which racial segregation impeded the efficiency of the armed forces. In reality, it set out to identify ways that the defense budget could be siphoned off to address civil rights issues in the face of congressional inaction.34 The report motivated McNamara’s directive to recalcitrant Service Chiefs demanding that they impose economic sanctions against local businesses that practiced off-base discrimination. The directive was timed to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of President Truman’s Executive Order 9981 banning segregation in the armed forces.35 Although the broader debate about civil rights crowded out McNamara’s directive and the Gesell Committee’s accompanying report, Yarmolinsky attracted the ire of southern congressmen, notably Mendel Rivers of South Carolina (who would later become Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee) and Felix Hebert from Louisiana, who falsely claimed that Yarmolinsky had written McNamara’s directive with “almost Satan-like zeal.”36 The Gesell committee’s work highlighted Yarmolinsky’s view, which he shared with Robert Kennedy, and which McNamara would allude to in his Montreal speech, that the defense budget could be used for social and economic purposes. McNamara’s decision to force base commanders to implement his directive suggests that although he let advisors—in this instance Gesell and Yarmolinsky—become the public face of the reforms, he was equally committed to their social objectives and inclined to tackle them even more aggressively than his advisors suggested. In the Johnson administration, Yarmolinsky’s career trajectory formally turned back towards domestic issues when he made the fateful decision to leave the OSD and join Sargent Shriver in running the War on Poverty program. One of the core programs in the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was the Job Corps, which provided educational and vocational training to disadvantaged youths. Shriver was the public face of the program, particularly in lobbying Congress; Yarmolinsky administered the program. The idea all along was that once the OEO was fully operational, Yarmolinsky would become Shriver’s deputy.37 However, what Yarmolinsky euphemistically described as “unhappy circumstances” scuttled the plans.38 In an acrimonious and public confirmation hearing, many of Yarmolinsky’s old enemies demanded that Johnson remove him from the program. Congressmen Harold Cooley of North Carolina and L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, together with many of their southern allies, specifically mentioned the Gesell Report in their attacks. The John Birch Society chimed in and published a tract decrying Yarmolinsky’s “long and extensive Communist background.”39 In the end, Johnson personally approved the decision to drop Yarmolinsky from the OEO, a decision Shriver said could “only be described as disgraceful.” Shriver lamented to his friend, “Well, we’ve just thrown you to the wolves, and this is the worst day of my life.”40 Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who were also close to the Kennedys, quoted one congressman: “It degraded every one of us. The Speaker, because he stayed silent. The President, because he gave in so quickly. The country, because a decent American was hung, drawn and quartered without a word in his defense.”41 Moreover, the decision to drop Yarmolinsky may have been unnecessary since the bill passed with a large margin of 226 votes to 185.42 The battle effectively ended Yarmolinsky’s upward trajectory in government and permanently soured his relations with President Johnson who never spoke to Yarmolinsky again and refused to even call him in the wake of the furor.43 Reeling from the experience, Yarmolinsky took on a number of temporary positions around government before finally being “promoted downward” back at the OSD as McNaughton’s deputy at ISA in October 1965.44 The move was widely regarded as an effort on McNamara’s part to protect his friend in a job that did not require congressional approval and which offered a temporary solution as Yarmolinsky prepared for life after government. At the same time, as McNamara grew increasingly concerned about the escalation of the U.S. role in Vietnam, he filled positions at ISA with men he could trust. Both McNaughton and Yarmolinsky spent the ensuing period focused on Vietnam and contributed to McNamara’s gradual disenchantment with President Johnson’s leadership on the war. Initially, Yarmolinsky approached the war as a technical issue: he did not advocate for an immediate withdrawal but instead looked for ways to better fight the war. He corresponded with his former colleague Daniel Ellsberg, who was posted in Vietnam as part of a team designed to revamp the pacification efforts and who returned to many ideas on Vietnam that had been de rigueur under the Kennedy administration. Ellsberg worked under Edward Lansdale with a number of other old hands on Vietnam, including the former CIA agent Lucien Conein and John Paul Vann, and warned that the United States was focusing on the conventional side of the war and that it could not do the job on its own “quite probably, not with a million troops and ten year’s efforts.”45 He reiterated recommendations from the early 1960s that argued for better coordination between civilian and military efforts and, in particular, highlighted the pivotal role of Special Forces in the war.46 Ellsberg’s suggestions echoed a speech that Yarmolinsky gave in July 1963 during a visit to Fort Bragg where the Special Forces were stationed and where he said, “you represent the fact that military force alone cannot guarantee success” in winning the support of people. He noted that in guerrilla warfare the “burden falls primarily on the people of the nations themselves,” and that the outcome of the war ultimately hinged on social, economic, and political progress, rather than military force alone.47 In private, as early as 1961, he had gone even further and explained that the Special Forces were “properly New Frontiersmen as much as any Peace Corps volunteer or AID mission member.”48 Yarmolinsky, who was impressed with Ellsberg’s reports and encouraged him to keep writing, was instrumental in getting Ellsberg’s work published and in introducing him to Robert Kennedy. He shared the reports with colleagues and friends and wrote to Kennedy that he should meet with Ellsberg whom he described as the “most intelligent and perceptive returnee from Vietnam.”49 In addition to Ellsberg, Yarmolinsky corresponded with Roger Hilsman, an erstwhile counterinsurgency expert who had been a pivotal player in the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policy. Hilsman criticized Johnson’s decision to deploy ground troops in Vietnam and admonished his colleagues for not sticking to the Kennedy policy despite their public statements to the contrary. In November 1965, Hilsman sent Yarmolinsky an article by the Vietnam expert Bernard Fall where the latter claimed that the war in Vietnam had become “unlosable” (i.e. the United States had now staked its credibility in Vietnam and could not afford to lose the war) and where he noted that the fundamental weakness of the United States’ strategy was its “optimism in military hardware.” Fall argued that what was most needed, and what was missing, was a sound political base in its South Vietnamese ally.50 Yarmolinsky responded angrily to Hilsman: he wrote, “I can’t object to academic uneasiness in an uneasy world, but I would hope that you, having been there, would give us a little more credit for uneasiness ourselves, and in the process help to keep the discussion from becoming a debating exercise.”51 Despite his dismissive attitude towards Hilsman, Yarmolinsky forwarded the article to McNamara noting, “This is probably worth reading in its entirety and perhaps assigning for analysis.”52 The article clearly had an impact on McNamara who, in January 1966, suggested to McNaughton that he bring in external experts and especially the professor of East Asian history Patrick Honey “to come over to ‘think’ with us about VN [and] referred also to an article which said that you can’t lick guerrilla wars without a political base and you can’t lose them if you have such a base… . The implication was that Thailand would resist guerrilla efforts even if SVN went down the drain. Also, the point was made that a great power can absorb political defeats, but not military ones—and that our great mistake was to let a likely political defeat get turned into a likely military defeat.”53 A week later, Professor Honey obliged and flew over from London to meet with McNamara and McNaughton.54 And so it was that in the final months of 1965 and into 1966, the OSD and ISA specifically splintered between its public support of escalation in Vietnam on the one hand, and private doubts about the basic premise of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam on the other. McNamara alluded to Fall’s ideas in Montreal when he said, “Military force can help provide law and order but only to the degree that a basis for law and order already exists in the developing society: a basic willingness on the part of the people to cooperate.”55 In many ways, 1966 was a pivotal year for McNamara and those around him. It was also a frustrating year tinged with nostalgia. As John Kenneth Galbraith warned years earlier, by 1966 “the political fortunes of the New Frontier [had] sunk under the rice fields” of Vietnam. 56 In the fall of 1965, McNamara considered leaving the Department of Defense.57 Yarmolinsky was also increasingly frustrated as Johnson refused to support his appointment as General Counsel at the Department of Defense. In his diaries, McNaughton compared Yarmolinsky to Biff Loman, the disillusioned and “lost” son in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman.58 Word got out that Yarmolinsky was preparing a move to Harvard University to join the new Kennedy School of Government whose Board members included many of the old Kennedy guard, including former British Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, Kennedy’s Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon, his advisors Michael Forrestal and W. Averell Harriman, as well as Jackie Kennedy. Rumors also circulated that Yarmolinsky might replace Hoover at the FBI—a scenario that horrified many of his critics.59 During this period, friends, presumably at least one of whom was Robert Kennedy, suggested that he should “leave with a blast at the White House.”60 That McNamara would turn to Yarmolinsky as he became embattled in 1966 was striking. Of all his advisors at the OSD, Yarmolinsky was perhaps the most politically engaged and connected to the left of the Democratic party. Where advisors such as McNaughton were disciplined and discrete, Yarmolinsky had a track record of speaking out against the prevailing consensus. As McNamara noted, he was “a person who has good judgment except with respect to himself.”61 His career made him especially attuned to the domestic implications of the Vietnam war at a time when these were becoming more salient and politically sensitive, especially for a Democratic president. More than that, by 1966, he had little appreciation for the military, Congress, and the president and was on his way out. Johnson’s betrayal reinforced Yarmolinsky’s professional loyalties to the Kennedys just as Robert Kennedy reemerged as a political contender. Without overstating his influence on McNamara, Yarmolinsky’s presence within McNamara’s inner circle at a time of crisis for the secretary was revealing and his imprint on the Montreal speech was unmistakable. ISA and the Limits of Dissent By the spring of 1966, McNamara’s frustrations with his colleagues in the Cabinet and with congressional leaders reached a boiling point. As a result, in April 1966, Yarmolinsky received word from McNaughton that “RSM will need a good speech in May. He intends to dictate a draft this weekend. Would like you to work on it. He will be ‘thinking big’ if he can get away with it!”62 At about the same time, McNamara commented to McNaughton that “there was a shortage of clear policy in gvt” and that he was still “deciding ‘how hard to push.’” To that end, McNaughton noted in his diary, “He wants me to draft a major speech by April 10 or so for him to play with and possibly give in Canada in mid-May.”63 In November 1967, during his infamous visit to Harvard (where he stayed at the Yarmolinsky home), McNamara explained the impetus for his speech to faculty members: “I got so goddam frustrated that I had to have some release… . Montreal was an immature act. My responsibility is not to build my image but to manage a department. In those terms, Montreal was a luxury. You don’t inspire men to obey commands by casting doubt on a central doctrine of their reason for being; that is, that security equals military power.”64 Figure 1: View largeDownload slide John T. McNaughton funeral, July 25, 1967, folder McNaughton Eulogy, July 25, 1967, box 195, Yarmolinsky papers, JFKL. Adam Yarmolinsky (center) delivered the eulogy and pallbearers included Robert S. McNamara (bottom-right on steps) and McGeorge Bundy (second from the bottom, left). Figure 1: View largeDownload slide John T. McNaughton funeral, July 25, 1967, folder McNaughton Eulogy, July 25, 1967, box 195, Yarmolinsky papers, JFKL. Adam Yarmolinsky (center) delivered the eulogy and pallbearers included Robert S. McNamara (bottom-right on steps) and McGeorge Bundy (second from the bottom, left). Without revealing his key role in the speech, Yarmolinsky challenged McNamara’s contention that it had not changed the terms of the debate on Vietnam or the Cold War. Just days after the speech, Townsend Hoopes, who would soon replace McNaughton at ISA, joined other colleagues in congratulating Yarmolinsky noting, “The Montreal speech seemed to me an agile, almost discreet declaration of independence from the rigidity and growing irrationality of official policy on fundamental issues… . Whether he or you intended it, it has made dissent more respectable and authoritative on China and Vietnam. I found it a thoroughly first-rate, educative, refreshing and courageous statement—a pole removed from the President’s nearly concurrent speech in Chicago.”65 In his “concurrent” speech delivered just a day before McNamara’s, Johnson had taken a hard line on Vietnam warning that “the failure to meet aggression means war, not peace” and, in a possible dig at his Secretary of Defense, lamented “Nervous Nellies” who could become “frustrated and bothered and break ranks under the strain, and some will turn on their leaders, and on their country, and our own fighting men.”66 Even if the Montreal speech reiterated views that had been prevalent throughout the 1960s, it nevertheless represented a public break with President Johnson, which both McNamara and his colleagues at ISA saw as a consequential step. As Hoopes had intimated to Yarmolinsky, many at ISA had become angry about the “irrationality” of policy on Vietnam but also on China where the administration did little to capitalize on the changed circumstances in the Communist camp after Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964.67 Even while Johnson began to speak of “holding the line” in Thailand and not Vietnam, and in the face of a now obvious Sino-Soviet split, official policies barely changed. The administration was reluctant to publicly move away from the United States’ containment strategy although George Kennan himself questioned its continued applicability as he did most clearly in February 1966 during a series of televised hearings organized by Senator Fulbright. By contrast, key administration officials, notably Rusk, remained steadfast. In Vietnam, the administration resisted McNamara’s call for a bombing pause and for earnest efforts on the negotiating front, including the Canadian Ronning missions to Hanoi from January to June 1966. McNamara had been the main advocate for a bombing pause in November 1965 hoping it might unlock negotiations. Since nothing came of it, by May 1966, he was on the defensive and pushing up against the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s recommendation to bomb POL targets and the hawks’ criticism that delays increased American casualties and offered the North an opportunity to move their POL reserves. Unlike Johnson and Rusk who put little faith in Ronning—a Chinese Communist supporter, an old acquaintance of Ho Chi Minh’s and an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy—McNamara staked his hopes on the Canadian effort.68 About Ronning’s second trip to Hanoi in March 1966, Rusk wrote the Embassy in South Vietnam: “quite frankly, I attach no importance to this trip and expect nothing of it.”69 By June 1966, as a result of U.S. delays in responding to North Vietnamese overtures, leaks, and inflexibility on both sides, Rusk was vindicated and the talks collapsed. By contrast, a remarkable recorded conversation between McNamara and Johnson from June 21, 1966 reveals McNamara’s faith and personal stake in Ronning. For eight long minutes, McNamara silently listened as Johnson lectured him reading a memorandum describing the failures of the Ronning mission. Asked for his response, McNamara was deflated, then furious. Lambasting the “reprehensible conduct on Canada’s part, dangling in front us,” he was forced to admit that it was “perfectly clear that it’s dead.”70 The following day, during what McNaughton described as a “staged NSC meeting,” McNamara fell in line as the administration decided upon bombing POL targets.71 McNamara was left to observe that, “No senior military leaders recommend anything other than proceeding with this program.”72 Faced with the suggestion that the United States might delay bombing in order to speak to Allies beforehand, Johnson added, “I hate like hell to give boys’ lives up to a bunch of damn Canadians.”73 Though he only said so in private, McNamara also blamed Rusk for the failure of negotiations. In 1966, as the Montreal speech implied, Secretary of State Rusk became a lightning rod for McNamara and his colleagues’ frustrations. The failure of negotiations was not Rusk’s alone but the State Department’s reticence to engage in meaningful talks and general inflexibility became increasingly distressing to McNamara as he had little faith in the military solutions on offer. As Schlesinger wrote in his journals after a private dinner with McNamara, by 1966, “the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State [had] exchanged roles—with McNamara asserting the political and diplomatic interests of the government and Rusk defending the view of the JCS.”74 The State Department had little appetite for the suggestion that the U.S. government might use the internecine conflict and chaos in Vietnam to make a deal with the Vietcong and pursue McNamara’s objective of “withdrawal with honor.”75 Furthermore, McNamara’s program of escalated bombing was not designed as an end in and of itself but as a means of getting the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. McNaughton noted in his diary, “Also [McNamara] has repeatedly agreed with me that our increased deployments each time were hoped (by him and me) to provide strength from which a compromise could be struck; each time Rusk kept the US eye on the VC total capitulation!”76 Years before, in a class plan for a course at Harvard Business School (HBS) where he began his career, Professor McNamara had noted a line from Alice in Wonderland: “You have to move pretty fast to stay where you are.”77 This was now his predicament in Vietnam where McNaughton assessed that even while the State Department might still be optimistic about U.S. prospects in Vietnam, the OSD had concluded that, “The future holds less than the present, that things are getting worse, that we have to stand still—so strong diplomatic initiatives and a compromise are called for now.”78 McNamara’s frustrations in this period were also aimed at Congress. In April, the budgetary authority for Vietnam operations was transferred away from the Military Assistance Program (MAP) to the defense budget proper, and thus away from SFRC oversight to the Armed Services Committees. Whereas the SFRC had become a forum for questioning the United States’ role in Vietnam, the relevant Armed Services Committees encouraged more aggressive policies. Despite his private misgivings, Senate Chairman Richard Russell together with House Chairman Mendel Rivers advocated for a more forceful approach and for giving the military freer reign.79 The budgetary transfer finalized the process of militarizing the commitment to Vietnam. If McNamara was frustrated with the rigidity of strategy for Vietnam, he also recognized that less conventional strategies that might be possible through the MAP were more difficult to finance or organize. Even if the administration began to renew steps on the “other war”—the pacification efforts under Robert Komer—the JCS continued to push for intensified bombing and troop increases. From a budgetary perspective, the JCS now had much more clout. At its core, Montreal was McNamara’s appraisal of the bureaucratic and budgetary pressures on the OSD that had permitted the failures in Vietnam, failures for which he had become a scapegoat but which were not his alone. In the early months of 1966, McNamara and his closest advisors at the OSD observed how military solutions had seduced, and then boxed in, civilian advisors in the State Department and White House.80 In his memoirs, McNamara concluded that the strategy of containment and a sense of American exceptionalism had propelled the United States into Vietnam. He wrote, “We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values.”81 Thirty years earlier however, he attributed the mistakes to the personal failings of civilian leaders and budgetary pressures. His was a dual dissent: dissent against the civilians who favored military options and dissent against the congressional leaders who failed to fund alternatives to military force. What McNamara recognized, and what he spoke to in Montreal, was that at heart the chosen policies for Vietnam, most recently in Operation Rolling Thunder, was a budgetary choice. McNamara had defended the administration’s policies in Vietnam before the SFRC in the weeks prior to Montreal. Yarmolinsky used McNamara’s notes from the hearings to write the speech. The Committee’s Chairman, Fulbright, used the hearings to develop arguments he would spell out forcefully in lectures that culminated in his book, The Arrogance of Power. He schooled the Secretary of Defense that, “It has been the experience of the human race when a country becomes very powerful it tends to become very arrogant and self-righteous and seeks to impose its will on other peoples.”82 In his diaries, McNaughton reacted by writing, “My guilty feeling went with our pretension that the answers are simple—as if Fulbright had nothing to his arguments. It’s the difference between the pose of a leader and the ruminations of an intellectual.”83 When McNaughton died in a plane accident in July 1967, Yarmolinsky’s eulogy spoke of this tension, of the “enormous demands that people in the world of ideas make on their government to be wise and just and good, and the enormous difficulty that people in government have in getting anything done at all.”84 Much as McNamara and his colleagues at ISA may have agreed with Fulbright’s arguments, they were mired in bureaucratic realities. They recognized that Fulbright’s Committee had been instrumental in creating pressures to militarize the commitment in Vietnam when it gutted the MAP that financed alternatives. McNaughton annotated an earlier draft of the speech (“MAP has been peanuts”) that had argued for a “national security budget” in lieu of a defense budget. Echoing anti-war senators’ arguments, the draft speech read, “In the long term our security might be better served, and the kind of world we seek might be more attainable if we took these additional funds directly from the defense budget for what I regard as even higher priority defense purposes.”85 Instead of arguing for something so transformational in Montreal, McNamara defended the usefulness of civic action, the kind of program that the MAP had funded, in the new kinds of conflicts. He explained that civic action had been a “semantic puzzle” but could be a more effective way of dealing with new conflicts by “using indigenous military forces for nontraditional military projects” involving “anything connected with economic or social progress.”86 Ultimately, the Montreal speech’s lament was not distinct from liberal criticism, it was a part of it. It picked up on McGovern’s assertion that “South Vietnam is not basically a military problem, but a political one” but criticized these same Senators for not providing financially viable alternatives.87 McNamara recognized that Johnson was “more comfortable with Dick Russell and Stuart Symington and the hawks than with the doves. But,” he added, “I don’t blame him—the way the doves have been acting.”88 Johnson correctly read the dangers to the Democratic party that progressive voices both outside and inside government might, with their failure to “cohese” [sic] around policy “tear the Democratic party right open.”89 But the tide was shifting against Johnson, who continued to dismiss Fulbright’s, McGovern’s, and McNamara’s criticism as “professorial.” He compared McNamara to Fulbright: “you had too much of a professor approach … both of you this goddamn crazy scholars, going around here with a pencil on your ear and want to try to dream out something when you sometimes you have to stand up.”90 He was similarly dismissive with McGovern and Michael Mansfield: “Goddamn it, George, don’t give me another history lesson. I’ve got a drawer full of lectures from Mansfield—another professor. I don’t have time to be sitting around this desk reading history books.”91 By contrast, despite dismissing Hilsman and Fulbright’s “intellectualism,” McNamara’s calendar in 1966 included many meetings with professors, including Professors Honey, Galbraith, and his former HBS mentor, Edmund P. Learned. The Implications of ISA’s Dissent In the short term, as Hoopes had written to Yarmolinsky, the Montreal speech encouraged dissent throughout government especially from Kennedy holdovers who grew nostalgic for the slain president’s ideas and policies. But perhaps more important, outside of government, the frustrations and ideas that underpinned the speech informed and encouraged Robert F. Kennedy as an ascendant political force. The liberal “insurgency” that was presaged in the Montreal speech and the nostalgia for the New Frontier would eventually propel Robert Kennedy’s candidacy.92 As for McNamara, the frustrations and divided loyalties that shone through in Montreal would eventually lead to his dismissal. In 1966, together with Kennedy holdovers outside the OSD including Hilsman, Harriman, and Forrestal, McNamara and his colleagues at the OSD began drawing direct comparisons between Kennedy’s and Johnson’s decisions for Vietnam. Their conversations mirror debates among Vietnam War historians, particularly with respect to the counterfactual question of “What would Kennedy have done?” The Montreal speech echoed John F. Kennedy’s speeches. While it lacked their soaring rhetoric, it translated many of the points that Kennedy had made—most notably in his inaugural address and later in June 1963 at American University—to the bureaucratic realities of the OSD. McNamara’s reflection on “rational man” mirrored Kennedy’s remark that “peace, therefore, [w]as the necessary rational end of rational men.”93 Ideas and phrases from the inaugural address also peppered the content of Montreal, including Kennedy’s pledge to developing countries “our best efforts to help them help themselves” or, as McNamara now put it, assistance if “they are willing and able to help themselves.”94 McNamara returned to ideas that had been prevalent under Kennedy and to policies that he had supported for Vietnam in the fall of 1963, namely that the United States role in South Vietnam should be limited to helping the South Vietnamese fight their own war.95 In Montreal, he observed, “Experience confirms what human nature suggests: that in most instances of internal violence the local people themselves are best able to deal directly with the situation within the framework of their own traditions… . And our role must be precisely this: to help provide security to those developing nations which genuinely need and request our help and which demonstrably are willing and able to help themselves.”96 This was the same position that he had defended in October 1963, both in public and in government, before the Kennedy assassination. Of course, in 1963 and 1966, McNamara was ambiguous about whether he could live with the full implications of this policy, namely whether he was willing to countenance a Communist takeover of the South to scrupulously apply a policy of self-help. Still, about the upcoming elections in Vietnam, he explained, “It is our goal to allow those people to choose the form of political institutions under which they prefer to live. I suppose you could conceive of them choosing some form other than a democratic form. If they did, we would adhere to that choice.”97 Just as McNamara and other “Kennedy men” began to serve President Johnson with growing discomfort, Johnson began to question their loyalty. Johnson’s suspicions grew more pronounced as Robert Kennedy emerged as a potential political opponent. McNamara’s concluding remarks in Montreal, in which he spoke of poverty, of a program of national service, and of the inequity of the draft, picked up themes that hinted at Robert Kennedy’s influence and exacerbated Johnson’s concern that his Secretary of Defense was a “Nervous Nelly breaking ranks.” Johnson was not alone in reading Robert Kennedy’s influence in McNamara’s growing “softness” on Vietnam. In fact, whenever McNamara became frustrated about Vietnam or about Johnson’s foreign policy, McNaughton suspected that “Bobby” had spurred him on.98 However, McNamara also encouraged Robert Kennedy, a further betrayal for Johnson. In one oral history, Edward Kennedy remembered, “My brother Bob used to go over on Saturday mornings and meet with Bob McNamara. He had a long series of meetings with McNamara, and McNamara was very candid and very honest and very frank. There’s no question that Bobby had a very important impact on McNamara, and McNamara, on the other hand, had a very important impact on Bobby.”99 By February 1967, rumors circulated that FBI Director Hoover had wiretapped both Yarmolinsky and McNamara’s phones and was accusing them of encouraging Robert Kennedy to run against Johnson. Yarmolinsky did not deny the accusation; he merely challenged the invasion of privacy.100 To Doris Kearns Goodwin, Johnson observed that McNamara began to feel a “division in his loyalties” between “the Kennedys” who he “loved and admired” on the one hand and “the Presidency” on the other. He added that McNamara “got surrounded by Paul Warnke, Adam Yarmolinsky, and Alain Enthoven … all the same cup of tea, all came to the same conclusion after old man Galbraith. Then the Kennedys began pushing him harder and harder. Every day Bobby would call up McNamara, telling him that the war was terrible and immoral and that he had to leave.”101 Though he did not call every day, Robert Kennedy did feature prominently in McNamara’s calendar and call log throughout 1966.102 Johnson’s exchange with Kearns also suggests that his concern about McNamara’s divided loyalties precipitated his decision to fire his secretary. Ever since Montreal, McNamara had returned to the idea that the problems in Vietnam were rooted in poverty and development and thus were not necessarily amenable to military solutions. In response, Johnson sent him to the World Bank where he was sardonically encouraged to dedicate himself to the economic issues that so troubled him. The move to the World Bank neutralized McNamara politically because, as an international civil servant, he could not intervene in domestic politics and therefore join a potential Kennedy campaign.103 In the longer-term, the frustrations of McNamara’s final years at the OSD spawned an intellectual legacy with contemporary resonance. Upon leaving office, McNamara published a book that summarized “the principles and philosophy by which I have directed the activities of the Defense Department.” It largely expanded on his ideas in Montreal, often using lines from the speech verbatim.104 For his part, Yarmolinsky became a prolific academic, including at Harvard Law School and at the University of Maryland. He positioned himself as an “objective” observer of civil-military relations and downplayed his time in government. McNamara read and commented on Yarmolinsky’s manuscripts: he generally agreed with their central thrust even if he did not share his former protégé’s bluntness. Taking advantage of his newfound intellectual freedom, Yarmolinsky returned to many of the positions that he had defended in office. He criticized the “military-industrial-labor-congressional complex” and one of its more salient outcomes: that because military solutions were more easily funded, they produced “centrifugal tendencies.”105 He produced a counterpoint to Samuel Huntington’s theory of civil-military relations that chastised Americans for their liberal impulse to intrude in the military sphere and argued that professional military authorities should be granted a high degree of autonomy. Instead, Yarmolinsky advocated for strong and intrusive civilian control. In contrast to Huntington, he worried that U.S. foreign policy had become too militarized “largely because civilians have adopted military ways of thinking about political problems” and suggested that the ultimate safeguard against this trend was “the capacity of civilians in the executive branch, in Congress, and among the public to remember that political problems, if thought about primarily in military terms, become military problems.”106 Ultimately, by looking at Yarmolinsky’s intellectual and professional trajectory in government up to the spring of 1966, a new perspective on the Montreal speech is possible. The speech was not a fleeting outburst but instead a climax in accumulated frustrations for both McNamara and those closest to him at ISA. Their frustrations were not only intellectual but personal, for their ambitions were stymied. Above all they were political, and disavowed Johnson’s decision-making style and his promotion of hawkish advisors such as Rusk and Rostow, whose rigid understanding of the problems in Vietnam McNamara, Yarmolinsky, and McNaughton opposed. McNamara and his colleagues were particularly exasperated that traditional and questionable military “solutions” had captured the imagination of civilian advisors and that these were easier to fund in the same Senate that was criticizing the secretary for his arrogance. The timing and location of the speech reflected their disappointment that civilian decision-makers resisted potential negotiation overtures although military victory was elusive, if not impossible. This paper sheds some light on the nature of McNamara’s disenchantment and on the gap between his public and private positions. Yet, as it does, the virulence with which he attacked dissenters and his relative silence during Cabinet discussions becomes harder to understand. The findings also cast light on overlooked pressures that civilian advisors in the OSD faced. Whereas Senators Fulbright or Mansfield are largely remembered as restrainers of the commitment in Vietnam, from ISA’s vantage point, they also inadvertently produced budgetary pressures that made military solutions easier to fund and thus to deploy. McNamara’s “blueprints for utopia” at the Defense Department had promised economic windfalls and a more adaptable defense policy in the shape of flexible response. Both evaporated with the Vietnam War. Despite McNamara’s early attempts to make Vietnam a test case for counterinsurgency warfare, senators such as Fulbright gutted the MAP that had funded options on the lower level of the military spectrum and left the secretary to “hold the line” against calls for increased troop deployments and bombing. Furthermore, by 1966, attempts to better control nuclear proliferation had also stumbled in the face of Soviet intransigence and French President Charles de Gaulle’s public distancing from the transatlantic alliance with his decision to pursue an independent nuclear force.107 In Montreal, McNamara chastised French allies for “insanely multiplying” risks. On one level, therefore, the Montreal speech was McNamara’s assessment of his “blueprints” at the Defense Department and spoke to the core of his disillusionment with the war in Vietnam. However, it also raises new questions about his and Yarmolinsky’s relationship to Robert Kennedy and to the emerging cracks within the Democratic party that would explode in the 1968 election. In many respects, the Montreal speech set the stage for Kennedy’s campaign platform: it focused on poverty, on his slain brother’s ideas of public service and on anger with the war in Vietnam. For a man whose central professional value was loyalty, this raises an important question about how McNamara hoped to influence policies in Vietnam when, by 1966, he concluded that he had lost most of his clout within the administration. Yarmolinsky’s papers in particular suggest that rather than confront the president privately and directly with his frustrations, McNamara chose to vent them publicly and indirectly. Neither route offered much in the way of solace or impact and McNamara was back at work the next day. Finally, by better situating Yarmolinsky in the historiography of the OSD under McNamara, another perspective on McNamara as Secretary of Defense is possible. The image of McNamara as a man surrounded by number-crunching “whiz kids” dominates the historiography of the OSD during the Vietnam War, but as he became embattled, he surrounded himself and confided in men like Yarmolinsky, McNaughton, Cyrus Vance, and Harriman. Even if they adopted the numbers- and evidence-based logic of the secretary, they were not stereotypical RAND analyst types. McNamara may have turned against the war for his own reasons, but Yarmolinsky provides a window into the intellectual context for Montreal when McNamara decided to “have some release” and “think big.” He also sheds light on McNamara’s lesser known and more progressive agenda at the OSD away from the Vietnam War. Yarmolinsky’s professional career focused on liberal causes and in a lawyer’s concern for process, guaranteeing that the federal government best-served the interests of the American people. He walked away from the OSD preoccupied with the “centrifugal forces” that the Defense Department exerted and concerned that the Cold War had undermined civil-military relations as the allure of military power had seduced civilians. Finally, Yarmolinsky’s example forces historians to consider the Vietnam War not just in the context of the war itself, of the Cold War, or in intra-administration power struggles, but also in the budgetary and bureaucratic context that constrained key decision-makers and especially McNamara. Footnotes I would like to thank Andrew Preston, Marc Selverstone, Steven Casey and Eliot Cohen who helped shape the initial iteration of this project, Daniel Ellsberg and Alain Enthoven for their willingness to share their memories of their colleague Adam Yarmolinsky, and the staff and anonymous reviewers at Diplomatic History for their helpful comments and assistance. 1 Robert S. McNamara, “Security in the Contemporary World,” Address before American Society of Newspaper Editors, Montreal, Canada, May 18, 1966, Montreal, box 30, Adam Yarmolinsky Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (hereafter JFKL). Hereafter cited as “Montreal speech.” 2 Ibid. 3 “Foreign Assistance Act, 1966,” Robert S. McNamara hearings in front of Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, April 6, 1966, HRG-1966-FOR-0009, U.S. Congressional Hearings Digital Collection Historical Archive, 174. 4 Montreal speech. 5 Ibid. 6 “The Real McNamara,” The New Republic 154, no. 23, issue 2689 (June 5, 1966): 7; “Stimulating Talk from a New McNamara,” Life Magazine 60, no. 22 (June 3, 1966): 4. 7 Roberts, Chalmers M., “Where Rusk, McNamara Differ,” Washington Post, June 26, 1966, A18. 8 “The Administration: O Positive,” Time Magazine 87, no. 21 (May 27, 1966): 28. 9 Andrew Preston, “Mission Impossible: Canadian Secret Diplomacy and the Quest for Peace in Vietnam,” in The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964–1968, ed. Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gettinger (College Station, TX, 2004), 117–43; Greg Donaghy, Tolerant Allies: Canada and the United States, 1963–1968 (Montreal, 2002); “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force” (“The Pentagon Papers”), Part VI.C.1, Histories of Contacts, 1965–1966, http://bit.ly/2B7ETDZ, accessed December 15, 2017. 10 Robert S. McNamara and Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York, 1995). 11 Carolyn Eisenberg, “The New Cold War,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 3 (June 2005): 423–27; Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (New York, 2016). 12 H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that led to Vietnam (New York, 1997), 328; Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in Vietnam (Ithaca, NY, 2001); Robert Dallek, “Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: The Making of a Tragedy,” Diplomatic History 20, no. 22 (April 1996): 147–62; Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York, 1984); George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Austin, TX, 1996). 13 Interview, Dr. Daniel Ellsberg with author, January 10, 2013. 14 For scholarship on McNaughton, Lawrence Freedman, “Vietnam and the Disillusioned Strategist,” International Affairs 72, no.1 (1996): 133–51; Benjamin T. Harrison and Christopher L. Mosher, “John T. McNaughton and Vietnam: The Early Years as Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1964–1965,” History 93, no.308 (2007): 496–514; Harrison and Mosher, “John T. McNaughton and Vietnam,” 505–34. 15 Oral history interview 1, Adam Yarmolinsky by Paige Mulhollan, July 13, 1970, p. 31, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library (hereafter LBJL). 16 Secretary’s calendar 1963, folder Calendar 1963, box II:67, RSM Papers, Library of Congress (LoC). 17 Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “… Hung, Drawn and Quartered,” Boston Globe, August 13, 1964, 15. 18 Mary McGrory, “The Poverty Bill’s Sacrificial Lamb,” Boston Globe, August 12, 1964, 7. 19 Adam Yarmolinsky: Personal and Professional History, February 7, 1962, folder 8, box 26, Paul C. Warnke Papers Georgetown University Manuscripts (hereafter Warnke papers). 20 Adam Yarmolinsky, “Individual Freedom and Governmental Restraints,” Stanford Law Review 10, no. 1 (1957): 185. 21 Adam Yarmolinsky Libel Material, September 7, 1966, folder 8, box 26, Warnke Papers. 22 Oral history interview 1, Adam Yarmolinsky by Daniel Ellsberg, November 11, 1964, 10, John F. Kennedy Oral History Collection (hereafter JFK OHC), JFKL. 23 “Funeral Service in Memory of Robert F. Kennedy, Memorial Church, Harvard University, June 10, 1968,” folder RFK Memorial Service at Harvard, box 195, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 24 “Remarks by the Honorable Sargent Shriver at a Memorial for Adam Yarmolinsky, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore, May 4, 2000,” Sargent Shriver Peace Institute, last accessed on November 24, 2015, http://goo.gl/KzLCSu. 25 Adam Yarmolinsky to Professor Linde, March 20, 1961, folder Chron File, Jan.–March 61, box 9, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 26 Remarks by Adam Yarmolinsky to the Society for Personnel Administration, October 25, 1961, folder Speeches, box 68, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 27 Research Institute Recommendations, April 19, 1963, folder AY Personal, box 94, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 28 Remarks by Adam Yarmolinsky, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, February 17, 1963, folder Speeches, 1963, box 70, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 29 Oral history interview 3, Adam Yarmolinsky by Daniel Ellsberg, December 5, 1964, p. 68, JFK OHC, JFKL. 30 Adam Yarmolinsky to Service Secretaries, February 12, 1963, Declassified Documents Reference System (hereafter DDRS): 207819-i1-22. 31 “Senate Probes “Muzzling” of Military,” Washington Post, October 8, 1961, A4. 32 “Mr. McNamara’s Responsibility,” New York Times, February 8, 1962, 28. 33 Oral history Interview 1, Robert S. McNamara by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office, April 23, 1986, folder Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office oral history interviews, box I:109, RSM Papers, LoC. 34 Morris J. MacGregor Jr., Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940–1965, Center for Military History, CMH Pub 50-1-1, 1981, p. 531–37 http://goo.gl/Jo21uC, accessed on November 24, 2015. 35 Ibid., 543–44, 547–49. 36 Ibid., 550. 37 Irving Bernstein, Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (New York, 1996), 100. 38 Oral history interview 1, Adam Yarmolinsky Oral History by Paige Mulhollan, July 13, 1970, LBJL. 39 “Pamphlet, John Birch Society - Revolution, the War on Poverty, a Documentary Filmstrip on the War on Poverty,” undated, folder 84, box 23, Social Movements Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. 40 Oral history interview 1, Adam Yarmolinsky Oral History by Paige Mulhollan, July 13, 1970, LBJL. 41 Rowland Evans, and Robert Novak, “… Hung, Drawn and Quartered.” 42 Bernstein, Guns or Butter, 111. 43 Conversation with Sargent Shriver, August 9, 1964, 4843, Miller Center White House Tapes, accessed on December 15, 2017, http://bit.ly/2Bt7DtF. 44 Just Ward, “Yarmolinsky’s Career: Promotion Downward?” Washington Post, October 27, 1965, A1. 45 Memorandum for the Record, Daniel Ellsberg, undated, folder Ellsberg, Daniel, box 49, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 46 “Vietnam Diary: Notes From the Journal of a Young American in Saigon,” Daniel Ellsberg, January 13, 1966, folder Subject File 45–65, box 42, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 47 Remarks by Adam Yarmolinsky, US Army Special Warfare School, Fort Bragg, NC, July 3, 1963, folder Speech File, box 66, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 48 Adam Yarmolinsky to Cyrus Vance, July 13, 1962, folder Chron File 62, box 11, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 49 Adam Yarmolinsky to Robert Kennedy, October 20, 1967, folder Subject File, Kennedy, Robert, box 199, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 50 Bernard Fall, “Vietnam Blitz,” The New Republic, October 9, 1965, 17; Roger Hilsman to Adam Yarmolinsky, November 18, 1965, folder Subject File, Vietnam, box 66, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 51 Adam Yarmolinsky to Roger Hilsman, November 13, 1965, folder Subject File, Vietnam, box 66, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 52 Adam Yarmolinsky to Robert McNamara, October 6, 1965, folder Subject File, Vietnam, box 66, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 53 Unclassified personal diary of John T. McNaughton, (hereafter McNaughton diary), January 8, 1966 (emphasis in original). On Bernard Fall’s criticisms of U.S. policy for Vietnam, see: Gary R. Hess and John V. McNay, “’The Expert’ – Bernard Fall and his Critique of American Involvement in Vietnam,” in The Human Tradition in the Vietnam War, ed. David L. Anderson (Wilmington, DE, 2000), 63-80 54 Secretary’s calendar 1966, folder Calendar 1966, box II:68, RSM Papers, LoC. 55 Montreal speech. 56 John K. Galbraith and James Goodman, ed., Letters to Kennedy (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 93. 57 McNaughton diary, March 25, 1966. 58 Ibid., May 13, 1966. 59 “Rumor Yarmolinsky Will Head FBI Is Horrifying to Some,” Washington Post, January 31, 1966, A2. 60 Rowland Evans, and Robert Novak, “Inside Report: Yarmolinsky to Quit, Joins JFK Institute,” Boston Globe, January 9, 1966, 69. 61 McNaughton diary, May 13, 1966. 62 John McNaughton to Adam Yarmolinsky, April 22, 1966, folder Draft speech, box 31, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 63 McNaughton diary, April 1, 1966. 64 “Impressions of the Secretary of Defense,” Graham Allison to Richard Neustadt, November 15, 1967, folder McNamara Visit, 1967, box 53, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 65 Townsend Hoopes to Adam Yarmolinsky, May 20, 1966, folder Subject File: RSM speech, box 31a, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 66 President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at a Democratic Party Dinner,” Chicago, IL, May 17, 1966, Mt Holyoke Documents Relating to American Foreign Policy, Vietnam, accessed on July 14, 2016, https://goo.gl/W4Gw07. 67 Benjamin T. Harrison and Christopher L. Mosher, “The Secret Diary of McNamara’s Dove: The Long-Lost Story of John T. McNaughton’s Opposition to the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 3 (June 2011): 501. 68 Preston, “Mission Impossible,” 124–29; McNamara, In Retrospect, 248. 69 Preston, “Mission Impossible,” 131. 70 Conversation with Robert S. McNamara, June 21, 1966, 10248, Miller Center White House Tapes, accessed on December 15, 2017, http://bit.ly/2kw2RRu. 71 McNaughton diary, June 23, 1966. 72 Notes of President Johnson’s Meeting with the National Security Council, June 22, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1964–1968, vol. IV, Vietnam, 1966, ed. David C. Humphrey (Washington, DC, 1998), doc. 161. 73 Conversation with Robert S. McNamara, June 22, 1966, 10249, Miller Center White House Tapes, accessed on December 15, 2017, http://bit.ly/2B6Nve8. 74 Thank you to Marc Selverstone for sharing this document. Arthur Schlesinger journal entry January 21, 1966, folder Comments and criticisms (pre-publications reviews), box II:97, McNamara papers, LoC. 75 Ibid. (emphasis in original). 76 McNaughton diary, April 4, 1966. 77 “Robert S. McNamara, 1942 - Annotated Casebook Vol. 1,” MBA Student Reports, Class Materials C.9, CB1942.54, Harvard Business School Baker Library. 78 McNaughton diary, January 4, 1966. 79 Caroline F. Ziemke, “Richard B. Russell and the “Lost Cause” in Vietnam, 1954–1968,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 61–62. 80 The advisors mirror a similar debate within the literature on the Vietnam War: James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston, MA, 1986); A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War 1954–1975 (New York, 2000). 81 McNamara and VanDeMark, In Retrospect, 270. 82 “Hearings, Foreign Assistance Act, 1966,” 21. 83 McNaughton diary, March 3, 1966 (emphasis in original). 84 “Eulogy,” Adam Yarmolinsky, Funeral Services for John T. McNaughton, Washington DC, July 25, 1967, folder McNaughton Eulogy, July 25, 1967, box 195, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 85 Adam Yarmolinsky Montreal speech draft, May 4, 1966, folder Notes and draft, box 31, Yarmolinsky Papers, JFKL. 86 Montreal speech. 87 Thomas J. Knock, “George C. McGovern and Mr. Johnsons’ War: A Liberal Democrat Dissents,” in The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964–1968, ed. Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gettinger (College Station, TX, 2004), 103. 88 McNaughton diary, May 18, 1966. 89 Conversation with Robert S. McNamara, May 7, 1966, 10106, Miller Center White House Tapes, accessed on December 15, 2017, http://bit.ly/2kvdGmU. 90 Conversation with Robert S. McNamara, March 4, 1966, 9928, Miller Center White House Tapes, accessed on December 15, 2017, http://bit.ly/2ANtYmf. 91 Knock, “McGovern and Mr. Johnsons’ War,” 106. 92 Herbert Y. Schandler, The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam (Princeton, NJ, 1977), 219. 93 President John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address,” American University, Washington, DC, June 10, 1963, The American Presidency Project, accessed on September 26, 2018, https://bit.ly/2QYRWzh. 94 President John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address,” Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961, JFKL, accessed on December 9, 2016, https://goo.gl/JhZk0D. 95 “U.S. Policy on Viet-Nam: White House Statement”, October 2, 1963, Mt Holyoke Documents Relating to American Foreign Policy, Vietnam, accessed on July 14, 2016, https://goo.gl/W4Gw07. 96 Montreal speech. 97 “Hearings, Foreign Assistance Act, 1966,” 183. 98 McNaughton diary, September 7, 1966. 99 Oral history interview 5, Edward M. Kennedy by James Sterling Young, June 17, 2005, EMK OH, accessed on November 24, 2015, http://goo.gl/Ww3xvi, 10–11. 100 Harry McPherson to President Johnson, February 1, 1967, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, accessed November 4, 2014, http://goo.gl/XTXW7T; Robbyn Swan to Robert S. McNamara, November 9, 1990, folder Miscellaneous, box I:109, RSM Papers, LoC. 101 President Johnson quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (London, 1976), 320. 102 Secretary’s calendar 1966, folder Calendar 1966, box: II:68, RSM Papers, LoC. 103 This is, at least, Daniel Ellsberg’s explanation for the move. Interview, Dr. Daniel Ellsberg with author, January 10, 2013. 104 Robert S. McNamara, The Essence of Security: Reflections in Office (New York, 1968), x. 105 See, for instance Adam Yarmolinsky, The Military Establishment: Its Impacts on American Society (New York, 1971); Adam Yarmolinsky, “Bureaucratic Structures and Political Outcomes” Journal of International Affairs 23, no. 2 (1969): 225–36. 106 Adam Yarmolinsky, “The Military Establishment (Or How Political Problems Become Military Problems),” Foreign Policy 1 (1971): 78; Adam Yarmolinsky, “Civilian Control: New Perspectives for New Problems,” Indiana Law Journal 49, no. 4 (1974): 669. 107 Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY, 2012). © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. 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TI - Breaking Ranks: Robert McNamara, Adam Yarmolinsky, and the Montreal Speech*
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhy091
DA - 2019-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/breaking-ranks-robert-mcnamara-adam-yarmolinsky-and-the-montreal-MXZKb6neuw
SP - 493
VL - 43
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -